A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

“We don’t have to,” Wilberforce said flatly. He felt very cold.

  “Because it goes without saying?”

  “Because it will never happen. I know you.”

  “I want to think that too, but the truth is that it might. In the daytime, or in the House, or with you, I believe, as you do, that if the day ever comes, I would die rather than lose myself in that manner. Then I wake up in the night, and I know that it’s not an abstract anymore. The day is coming very quickly; once or twice it’s seemed already upon me. And I don’t want to die. I love this country with every breath in my body; I don’t want to leave it yet, and I don’t want to leave it like this. I haven’t finished. And it would be so simple at times like that… not to have to finish.”

  His voice was perfectly, quietly matter-of-fact, but Wilberforce had to wait a moment before he could rely on his own voice being as steady.

  “You have as many faults as anyone,” he said. “I know them all. I’ve known them, and you, for many years. And in all those years, I’ve never once known you to fail to do what is right just because not doing so would be simple. You never will.”

  “You have to consider the possibility that you’re wrong.”

  “No, I don’t. I have certain firm, unalterable beliefs about the nature of the universe. I believe the ground under my feet will support me; I believe the tide will go in and out; I believe the sun will rise and set each day; I believe there is a God who watches over all of this and loves us. I don’t need to consider the possibility that I am wrong about these beliefs, because I am not. Your nature is a part of the nature of the universe. And I am not wrong about it.”

  “I wish I had your faith.”

  “I wish so much that I could give it to you.”

  For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Wilberforce was surprised to hear his own voice when it came again; he had meant to speak the words, but his voice didn’t sound like his own.

  “If it makes you feel better, I’ll promise.”

  Although he couldn’t see him, he was certain Pitt blinked as he was startled out of his thoughts. “What will you promise?”

  “I promise that if the time ever comes when you are a danger to others, I will stop you.”

  It was a moment before Pitt’s response came, and this time Wilberforce couldn’t imagine what was playing across his face. “Do you swear it?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “I’m afraid I do,” Pitt said. “Please.”

  “Then I swear it.” He heard his voice take on the more formal cast of the House of Commoners, even though he had never felt farther away from the world that comprised that House. “If circumstances ever reach a point where you, as your true self, would wish me to stop you, I swear I will grant that wish. Whatever the cost of that may be.”

  “Thank you,” Pitt said. Again, his voice was matter-of-fact, but this time Wilberforce could hear both relief and exhaustion lurking in a sigh behind it. “I will, of course, do everything in my power not to force such a duty on you. But that means a great deal to me.”

  “It’s my honor,” Wilberforce said. It sounded ridiculous, and of course in part it wasn’t true. The very thought of it made him feel sick. But it was an honor, nonetheless. And what was more important, it was all he had left to give.

  They left a little after two o’clock, driving out through the gates of the Clapham grounds into the darkness. It seemed to Wilberforce that they had simply been swallowed up, and if they were never to return, there would be no trace to show that they had ever been there at all. It was nonsense, but the face of his wife as she said goodbye to him was still in his mind, and he thought it anyway.

  At Sea

  January 1806

  They should have been home by now. Nobody said it, but it hung about the ship like mist. A steady, contrary wind had pushed at them all the way from Gibraltar—not enough to send them back, just enough to keep the horizon tantalizingly out of reach. The sky was pale and cloudless; the waves were calm. Kate and Sinclair together had tried to counter it and had succeeded only in gaining them a few knots. It wasn’t natural. Nobody wanted to say that either, but it was true.

  “Why, though?” Hester asked out loud. She and Fina sat on the battered quarterdeck of the Victory. It was a warm evening, and the breeze blew against their faces. “I can believe it possible that there are French ships not far away with weather-mages on board able to keep this up. But why should they care about our return? And if they do care so much, why not engage us? Why this delay?”

  “Perhaps this is only the beginning,” Fina said. “Perhaps they mean to wait for reinforcements.”

  “Which brings us back to why.” Hester sighed explosively. “I wish we knew what was happening there.”

  Fina understood. By all rights, it should have been over. The French fleet had been destroyed with the stranger on board; even though the stranger had escaped, he must surely be weakened and adrift in foreign lands. There was no question, too, that France had been dealt a critical blow. The crew had been celebrating for days, despite their genuine sadness over Nelson’s loss. His body was being brought back to England with them, preserved in a cask of rum—which was, it had been agreed, macabre at best, and at worst a waste of good rum. Still, something wasn’t right. It was more than the peculiar weather, more than the eeriness of the battle-scarred ship and the morbid cargo they carried. Something was brewing over the horizon.

  It didn’t take them long to find out what it was.

  At first the change in the wind seemed hopeful. It was a fresher, wilder breeze than before, without the underlying sweetness that sometimes signaled magic. The sails stirred, and the deck creaked beneath them. Nobody noticed the dot wheeling on the horizon, like the circling of a gull, and they would have paid no heed to it if they had.

  The cry went up from the crow’s nest at dusk. The shape on the horizon was getting larger—larger than an albatross, which had been the guess of those who had started to guess at all, and growing larger still as it drew near. Fina and Hester joined the other magicians on the deck as Hardy was handed the telescope.

  “What is it?” Kate asked. She was only recently out of bed, her arm still in a sling and her ribs still painful, but she showed no sign of that now as she squinted at the sky. “Is it a shadow?”

  “Far too big,” Hardy said. He squinted through the lens. “It’s the size of the kraken, at least. And it looks too substantial for a shadow. That thing has weight and mass, whatever it is.”

  A great roar tore across the ocean. It sounded like thunder and wind and the shriek of a seabird—like a hurricane coming to roost. Flame shot from the sky. Far away, the waves sizzled.

  “That’s a dragon,” Hester said.

  Now that Fina knew what she was looking at, the shadow resolved itself into leathery wings, a long sinewy body, a forked tail. It was still some miles away—much farther than they had thought, now that they realized how large it must be. But it was approaching fast.

  “It can’t be,” Hardy said.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Hester said. “Of course it is.”

  “There hasn’t been a dragon sighted for three hundred years.”

  “Then this is the first dragon sighted for three hundred years. If you act fast, you can live to tell your grandchildren about it. For God’s sake, Captain—”

  “We need to ready the ship for battle,” Fina said. The phrase escaped her momentarily. “To quarters.”

  “Beat to quarters, yes.” Hardy grabbed at the words like a familiar handle in the dark. “But keep it quiet. It may yet pass us by. Fina, if it does come closer, can you do here what you did with the kraken? Hold it?”

  “I can try,” she said steadily.

  She knew almost nothing about dragons. Napoléon’s kraken had been a practical reality for the British navy and to some extent for trading ships for some years; dragons were all but mythological. But she had a very strong sense that they would not be easy to stop.

  “
It may have no idea this ship is here,” Kate said. “Its trajectory is erratic.”

  The hoarse whispers were going up around the ship now: ready the ship, prepare to engage. The rumble of footsteps and cannons being wheeled into place reverberated across the deck. The contrast between this and Trafalgar, though, was palpable. The ship had already felt tired and fragile. Now it seemed as if they were balanced on a skeleton of wood, with all its flesh already burned away.

  “We’re proofed against mage-fire,” Hester said, as though reading Fina’s mind. “But the stories say there is no proof against a dragon, not for long.”

  “What else do the stories say?” Fina asked.

  Hester shook her head. “Oh, the usual. Their scales can’t be penetrated, their claws can rip through iron—but Fina, the only magicians with any sway over them have been blood magicians. They were last used in battle during the Vampire Wars.”

  That, far more than the dragon, chilled her. “Then this is the stranger.”

  “It must be.”

  The shape ahead suddenly took on a new menace. “He’s alive and well, then.”

  “It seems so. And unless the presence of the dragon is indeed a coincidence and it means to pass us by, then the stranger does not intend for us to return to England. What could be happening there?”

  Fina turned her attention to the horizon without answering. She had no answers to give.

  England

  January 1806

  Since their trip to France more than twenty years ago, Pitt had never been more than eighty miles or so from London. Wilberforce, of course, flitted around the country like an endlessly curious butterfly, seemingly without a care for his physical fragility or the boredom and hardship of long-distance travel. As far as Pitt had ever been able to tell, he liked new places as much as he liked new people, and he liked revisiting old places as much as he liked revisiting old friends. Pitt actually wasn’t opposed to either himself, but it was one of the many things he’d rapidly realized was not possible when at any given minute somebody in Westminster might need to speak to him urgently. Being away from Downing Street was being unavailable, along with sleeping with his door closed and expecting to be able to eat or work uninterrupted. If he wanted to go anywhere for any length of time, as he had done recently to Bath, he had to be prepared to relocate most of his administration along with him.

  Within those eighty miles or so, however, he had done a good deal of traveling, and he had done a good deal of this traveling with Wilberforce. The two of them were perfectly capable of talking all the way from London to Cambridge without pause, and then turning around at the end of the day and resuming the conversation from Cambridge to London; sometimes they continued it over dinner afterward. This time, however, both of them rode for some time in silence.

  To some extent it was a comfortable silence, as it always was between them. It wasn’t, however, a pleasant one. From the look on Wilberforce’s expressive face, he was locked in one of the depressions more characteristic of him than those not close to him ever suspected. Normally Pitt would say something to make him feel better, but in this instance it was hard to know what to say. He couldn’t make the situation they were in less dark, and he certainly couldn’t say anything to ease his friend’s mind about his family that wouldn’t sound at best hopelessly naive. When the sun came up, it would perhaps seem brighter, but the cold, starless night seemed to be telling them that all hope was lost.

  Pitt had never exactly had hope since Rose had come to tell him about Austerlitz, although he wouldn’t admit to hopelessness either. He had a task to do, and he was setting himself to work at it with all the dogged, unfeeling persistence of the horses tethered to their carriage. Intellectually, he’d known that he would be fighting to accomplish it before the strength ebbed from his body. But he hadn’t anticipated how fast that was suddenly happening. Whether it was the news from Austerlitz or the nightwalk or just the natural turning of a tide, it was no longer an ebb, but a rush. He’d noticed it over the journey to Clapham, but he’d hoped and expected to recover once he got to the comfortable chaos that was the Wilberforce household. Instead, he’d woken feeling horribly weak and ill, and his heart had almost failed him at the thought of the journey ahead. He almost didn’t care what was waiting at the very end of it. His magic scorched in his veins, and bloodlines sparked in his head like shards of jagged light.

  Not yet, he tried to tell it. You can have all of me in a few hours. You can unleash and burn me up on your way out, I don’t care. Just not yet.

  One part of that was a lie. He did care.

  “Pitt?” Wilberforce’s voice came unexpectedly.

  It took Pitt a second to disentangle himself from his thoughts; when he did, he managed a rueful smile. “I’m sorry. What is it?”

  “Forester. Is he confident that he can improve the elixir?”

  “He seemed so, in his last letter,” Pitt said carefully. He didn’t allow himself to consider what it would mean if he hadn’t, and this really was as strong as he would ever be again. “Why?”

  “I simply wondered… Could it be made to work for the enemy as well?”

  “I don’t know.” The idea gave him a faint chill. “I doubt it. Why?”

  “Because if it can, then perhaps we can make peace after all. If the enemy no longer needed to kill to survive, then perhaps terms could be reached.”

  “What terms?”

  “At present, our only plan is to play out the challenge—for you and the enemy to face one another in a duel of magic. But perhaps we can promise him the elixir in exchange for the end of the war.”

  Pitt was shaking his head before Wilberforce had finished speaking. “No. He would never agree to that. And if he did, we could never trust him.”

  “Perhaps he wouldn’t agree, it’s true. But if he did, I think we could trust him. Vampires are bound by honor, after all. A promise made in lieu of a duel would be as binding as a duel itself. Perhaps this doesn’t need to end in blood.”

  Pitt was about to reply when the carriage jolted and pain lanced simultaneously from his stomach to his limbs. He should have been used to it by now, but it took him by surprise, and a gasp escaped him before he could bite it back.

  He glanced at Wilberforce quickly to see if he had noticed, and found his friend looking at him with understanding and sympathy but without surprise. Of course he had noticed.

  “Would it help if we slowed down?” Wilberforce asked. “We could afford to lose a little time if we take shorter stops.”

  “No,” Pitt said, as normally as he could. “I think I’d prefer to get the journey over with as quickly as possible.”

  Wilberforce nodded. “If you change your mind, let me know. My coachman isn’t the gentlest of drivers.”

  Pitt didn’t change his mind over the next thirteen hours or so, but they swiftly spiraled into such perfect hell that he almost ceased to care whether he lived or died. The rattle and clammy stuffiness of the carriage meant that he was continually racked with pain and nausea, and his attempts to hide it were gradually worn away by sheer misery. Twice they stopped for a few hours to bait the horses, at Maidstone in the early morning and Ashford at midday, and he did his best to rally and keep Wilberforce company while his friend ate and stretched his legs. He couldn’t eat himself, and hadn’t for some days, but they still had to stop the coach six times for him to be wretchedly and ineffectually sick before his stomach worked that out.

  This is ridiculous, he tried to tell himself. This is a very comfortable carriage through good roads in the middle of England. Consider what Fina endured when she was only a child. Think of what she endured again to get here.

  His mind accepted that this was a very sound point. His body didn’t care. It was dying, and it hurt.

  As the world turned to gray around them and the roads grew slightly smoother, he managed to rest his head against the window and doze, always half-conscious of the pattern of light playing across his closed eyelids. Every now and
then a bump on the road would startle him into opening his eyes, and he caught flashes of landscape rolling past and glimpses of Wilberforce opposite him. Finally, he felt the ground under the wheels shift to finer sandstone and heard the first faint, distant cry of gulls on the wind.

  “It’s a left turn at the next signpost,” Pitt said without opening his eyes.

  Wilberforce didn’t react for a second, possibly out of surprise or drowsiness; then Pitt heard the window slide up and felt a quick rush of a breeze as Wilberforce stuck his head out the window to shout the information to the driver.

  “I thought you were asleep,” he added to Pitt as the window shut again.

  “No,” Pitt said, forcing his eyes open. It was probably early afternoon now, but the miserable quality of the light made it impossible to tell. “No, I’m not.”

  “It’s been a terrible bumpy road,” said Wilberforce, who cheerfully bumped over far more terrible roads than this for even longer stretches of time. “I’ll be glad to stop at Forester’s. How did you know where we were? I thought you only sensed shadows and bloodlines.”

  “I do,” Pitt said, smiling faintly. “I just know the way to my own castle.” The carriage jolted again, and he caught his breath involuntarily.

  His friend winced; knowing Wilberforce, he was feeling the uneven ground on Pitt’s account more than Pitt was himself. “Not far now. Are you going to be all right in this carriage for a little longer?”

  “I’m not going to make it to my own castle any other way, am I?”

  “No.” Wilberforce sighed. “I wish you’d eat something.”

  “I wish you’d stop fussing.”

  “I can’t help it. I’m worried. I always fuss when I’m worried.”

  “What are you worried about?”

  “So many things,” Wilberforce said with his usual disarming honesty.

  “Name them.”

  “Never mind. It would only worry you.”

  He had to laugh, even though it hurt. “Oh, Wilberforce.”