A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  “Not yet.”

  “Not yet.” His voice grew slightly more confident. “She might have encountered some difficulty on the way. Well, what she told you is correct, to a point. But Fina doesn’t know quite everything.”

  “What doesn’t she know?”

  “It isn’t so much a question of what. It’s one of your favorite questions, the kind that involves statistics. It’s a question of how many.”

  Wilberforce thought for a second. And then suddenly, it was before him, as though somebody had lit paper and set it ablaze. He felt his eyes widen. “Oh dear God.”

  “There you are,” the enemy said with satisfaction.

  “What is it?” Pitt asked sharply.

  Wilberforce shook his head helplessly, for a second lost for words. The scope and horror of it made him feel he was hearing about slavery for the first time. “It isn’t only the slaves in Jamaica, is it?”

  “No,” the enemy said. “It isn’t. Every spellbound slave in British territory is in my power. It took me a long time to work my way into the alchemy, but I’m there now, thrumming in their blood, wrapped around their hearts. One command from me, and they will all rise at once.”

  Pitt had gone very still. “How many?”

  He might have been asking the enemy, but Wilberforce answered. “Hundreds of thousands.”

  “They’re mine now,” the enemy said. “More surely than they were ever yours. That was what I wanted to tell you, before we began the duel we came here to fight. If we duel, and I find myself, impossibly, losing, then I will use the last of my strength to give them just one command. I’ll tell them to rise and fight. And there will be no countermanding that command. They will not break free from it. There will be no alchemy to wear off. They will fight until they die, and they will die in droves, but they will also kill. Your colonies will be lost forever. So will the lives of everyone in them.”

  “That’s…” Wilberforce found his voice trailing away. Pitt said nothing at all. “You couldn’t do that. They’d be conscious the entire time. They’d have to watch themselves murder and be murdered and not be able to stop until they’re dead.”

  “Perhaps they wouldn’t want to stop. Perhaps they’d rather be dead.”

  “They’d rather be free. Not dead, and not bound by anyone—including you.”

  “They don’t have that choice, I’m afraid.” The enemy turned to Pitt. “It’s your own fault, you know. If spellbinding had ended, I would have been powerless. All those years, all those millions of people crammed into filthy ships and trapped in their own heads. All that rage and pain that nobody wanted to listen to. You let it rest.”

  “You ensured that spellbinding wouldn’t be allowed to be abolished,” Wilberforce said. “You were working against us all along.”

  “Well,” the enemy said, “you made it easy.”

  “I know,” Pitt said.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Wilberforce said. “I fought those battles. I may have lost, but I know they weren’t easy at all, not for either side.”

  “Because of you,” Pitt said. “You, and Clarkson and Equiano and the others. But he’s quite right. You know he is. I was distracted and exhausted and I didn’t care enough, and I let it rest. It’s my fault.”

  “You don’t control the actions of the entire British government. You’re only human, for God’s sake.”

  “Indeed,” the enemy agreed. “And I am more. That is why you cannot win.”

  “You’re less,” Wilberforce shot back. “You’ve made yourself less. And I’m so very, very sorry for you.”

  The enemy glared at him. His eyes flashed magic, like a blade in the dark, and Wilberforce felt the first touch of mesmerism with the first echo of pain before it was sheathed once more. This time, he held the enemy’s gaze and did not look away first.

  “I can plunge the British West Indies into bloodshed and chaos with a single push,” the enemy said after a moment. “But I don’t want to do it, if I can help it. If I do, after all, it means I’ve already lost.”

  “It means we’ve both lost.” Pitt had recovered some of his equilibrium. “You know I won’t fight a duel with that as the victory. Nor will I concede the duel to you. So what do you propose?”

  “Something very simple.” He paused. “I would very much like to possess Great Britain. But I want to possess France more—not from within the shadows, but openly, freely, in the light of day. And frankly, that struggle means more to me than my struggle with you. We’re the last of our bloodline. We’re enemies, of course, our kind always are. But there’s no reason we need to be at war, with the whole world to split between us.”

  “That wasn’t what you said the first time we spoke.”

  “Things have changed since then.”

  “I see.” Pitt had been frowning slightly; his face cleared. “Bonaparte really is proving rather too much for you, isn’t he?”

  “I wouldn’t say too much.” It wasn’t convincing. “But I confess, he’s a different proposition to poor little Robespierre. I’d like to deal with him before he gains in power. So would you, for different reasons. And you must admit, I’m better placed to deal with him than you are. Shall we call a halt to this, then, and let us both do our work?”

  “If you destroy Bonaparte, you’ll take his place. Why should I find a vampire king in France a more secure prospect than a mage-emperor?”

  “Because his war is with England. My war is with you. And I’m willing to end that war and accept England as your territory if you accept France as mine. We can sort out the disputed areas later. It’s probably only fair that Europe be left to me, assuming I can conquer it. You won’t have the magic to spare for it.”

  Pitt’s eyebrows shot up. “You want me to give you Europe.”

  “It isn’t yours to give. And I concede that the British Empire, as it stands, isn’t mine to offer. We’ve been fighting a vampire war for more than a decade. What I propose is that we live in terms of peace, according to the code of honor that has existed between those of our bloodline since the Dark Ages. As long as I occupy my territory, it is my own. As long as you occupy yours, it belongs to you. I’ll stop trying to take it from you.”

  “You mean it belongs to me until I die,” Pitt said. “By your own admission, that might be a very short time.”

  “By your admission,” the enemy snorted. “By mine, you’re unlikely to last the month, as you are. But you don’t need to be as you are. I’ve told you that. You can be as you were, young and strong and brilliant, and you can be that way forever. That is what I am proposing, William Pitt the Younger. Britain safe and protected, under your leadership, for as long as you wish it. You can fulfill every dream you ever had for your country when you first pledged yourself to it twenty-two years ago, and you can do it in days of peace and well-being.”

  “And how many people will have to die for that?” Wilberforce demanded. He glanced at Pitt and felt a thrill of fear at the unreadability of his face. Darkness and illness had already made it unfamiliar; now he could hardly recognize it at all.

  “On my part? However many I choose,” the enemy said dismissively. It was Wilberforce’s question, but he was answering Pitt. How many. “On yours, perhaps one or two people a year. I’ve found that to be enough for comfortable survival, depending on your self-discipline, which in your case is unimpeachable. How many people have died in this war already? How many die thrown overboard from filthy slave ships far from home? For that matter, how many die in the streets in poverty and despair? You wanted to make things better when you became leader of this country. You’ve failed so far, and if you were to die tomorrow, you will have failed forever. This is what it takes. One life a year from millions spared. And the courage to do something you could never picture yourself doing.”

  “You’re wrong,” Pitt said. His face was still expressionless, but his eyes were very dark. There no longer seemed to be any fire or brilliancy in them. “I could picture it. I could always picture it.”


  The enemy lowered his head and met his gaze properly for the first time. “I know.” There was the faintest hint of a smile.

  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.

  This was why Pitt had made Wilberforce promise. He had believed deep down that when he came face-to-face with his own death, he would not be able to let his territory go. His life and the well-being of Great Britain were inextricable in his own head. He could not let himself die, because he could not bear to leave his country to suffer without him.

  And he didn’t want to die. Of course he didn’t. He had been fighting to live for such a long time, and he was tired, and he was scared. For a moment, Wilberforce saw the cellar as if from the outside: the three of them facing each other for the first time after a lifetime of conflict, and all of them deep down so frightened.

  “You’re not going to do this,” Wilberforce told Pitt. He willed it to ring true. “You’re not.”

  “You should encourage it,” the enemy said. “If you want the slaves freed. If I have what I want, you know, I’m perfectly willing to let them go.”

  He wasn’t tempted, exactly. But he was, for the moment, distracted. “You can break the alchemy?”

  “Is that what your price would be? Is that what you want? Another Saint-Domingue in the British West Indies?”

  Wilberforce shook his head. “No.”

  “I wonder. I can’t give it to you, I’m afraid. If I were to release them, the British spellbinding would still hold. But you’d have no further trouble from me. You’ll be free to fight for abolition on your own terms, though I can’t promise you’ll be any more successful. It took very little nudging on my part to keep the status quo. Then again, if your friend here is willing to take charge of his subjects as his bloodline instructs, that shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “I won’t do that,” Pitt said.

  “It makes no difference to me how you plan to control or not control your territory.” Irritation rippled through his voice. “Do whatever you like with Britain. Have freedom or slavery or wealth or poverty or magic or mundanity—I really do not care. Just leave me mine, and I will leave you yours. Isn’t that what peace is?”

  “It would mean leaving France under your control,” Pitt said.

  “They already are. You can’t change that, except by defeating me, and you can’t do that. You know you can’t.” He sighed. “Please stop torturing yourself. You know what you have to do. There is no choice. What’s more, you know what you want to do. Peace with honor; that’s what you keep talking about in the House. Well, this is peace with everything you could wish for. Life, health, security, and long years of freedom to make your country anything you want it to be. Aren’t you tired of dying and watching your country die with you?”

  “Yes,” Pitt said. “I am.”

  “This isn’t peace with honor,” Wilberforce said, as calmly as he could. He didn’t feel calm at all. Suddenly nothing in the universe was as it should be. He felt as though he were clinging to hope by his fingertips, and they were slipping. This wasn’t how this encounter had been supposed to go. “There is no honor in becoming what it wants you to become.”

  “No,” Pitt said. “No, there isn’t. Not for me. But I’ve sacrificed far more important things for the safety of this country.”

  “No you haven’t,” Wilberforce said. “And don’t you dare try to make this sound noble. It’s monstrous.”

  “And if it saves the country, is it monstrous then?”

  “Yes,” Wilberforce said desperately. “Yes, it is. Of course it is. Can’t you see that?”

  “I can,” Pitt said. “But if it saves the country, I can’t let that stop me.”

  “I’ll stop you.”

  “You can’t.”

  And that was right, too. Nobody had ever argued Pitt out of doing anything he was truly resolved to do.

  He tried anyway, helpless. “Pitt—”

  “Do you have another plan?” Pitt demanded, turning to him suddenly. The enemy could probably have attacked then, it occurred to Wilberforce briefly, but it didn’t. It didn’t because it knew it had won. “If you do, Wilberforce, then please tell it to me. I don’t want to die, but I will, if it will help. Tell me. Please. Because until you do, this is all I have to give. And I will give it.”

  This was it. They had come out here to face an enemy, and it had beaten them. The room around them seemed in that moment to become the whole of the universe, and the three of them drifted in it lost and alone.

  I don’t know what to do, he thought. Please, God, tell me what to do.

  He looked at his friend’s face. He had thought a moment ago that it looked like a stranger’s, but it didn’t. It was half in shadow, the way it had been the night in France when he had asked Wilberforce to trust him without asking questions, and it was thin and tired, the way it had been the day at Walmer when Wilberforce had told him the country would soon need him back. But it was still his friend’s face, the one that he had seen in all its moods and public appearances and unguarded moments over so many years.

  “Do remember the tree at Holwood?” Wilberforce heard himself say. He didn’t mean anything by it. He knew better than to appeal to Pitt through emotion when his mind was made up. But the memory had unexpectedly come back to him, and in the horror of the underground chamber he had felt the warmth of the sun and the breeze in the leaves, and he smiled a little.

  Pitt looked startled, but for just an instant, he smiled too.

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course I do.”

  Wilberforce took a deep breath. “Very well,” he said. He was still very scared, but the universe was shifting back into place around him. “If you can see yourself doing it, if you honestly think it’s right to do it, then do it. I’m right here. Kill me.”

  A frown flitted across Pitt’s face.

  “If you think it’s what you have to do to save the country and yourself, then I’m offering myself. If you say you can imagine doing it, then imagine doing it to me, and then do it.”

  “Do you think that I won’t?”

  “I hope so much that you won’t. I fear that you will. I truly do mean it, if that’s what you mean. If it needs to be done, then please do it to me.”

  “Do you think it needs to be done?”

  “No,” Wilberforce said, with all the passion he could put into his voice. “No, I never, never, never will do that. But I promised that if you ever reached a point where you, as your true self that I know and love, would want to be stopped, I would stop you. I’ve failed to some extent, I know that. I can’t stop you from becoming what it wants you to be, if you can’t stop yourself; I can’t kill you before you do so, which is what I know you wanted and what I meant when I made that promise. But I can stop you from committing an act of murder, even if just the first of a long line. I can save your first victim, and maybe that will help you, too, in some way, I don’t know. I don’t know anything. But if you have to take a life—if you really, really have to—then I’m giving you mine first.”

  For a long moment, the longest moment of Wilberforce’s life, Pitt stood and regarded him. His face was unreadable, but a thousand thoughts and arguments and calculations were flickering behind his eyes. That wasn’t unusual, of course. But now, at this close range, Wilberforce felt as though he were seeing them play across his mind, lightning-fast reasonings but memories, too, and feelings. What those feelings were, though, it was impossible to tell.

  Then, slowly, Pitt’s mouth quirked into a familiar wry smile. The enemy’s smile, Wilberforce realized, had never really looked like Pitt’s at all.

  “I knew there was a reason I never had you in my government,” Pitt said. “You were always far too good for it.”

  He turned to the enemy. “Interesting though your proposition is,” he said, raising his voice, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline on behalf of Great Britain. I told you I
could imagine myself ceding to your wishes, and I could. But it transpires that I simply have a very overactive imagination.”

  “Then you will die, here and now in this miserable castle, under the earth.”

  “I might.”

  “You will. And your territory will fall to me.”

  “It isn’t a territory. It’s a country. And as its prime minister, I maintain that it will not.” It was the language of the House of Commoners, defiance and bravado and eloquence, because that was where Pitt was most himself. “At the very least, it will not fall because of me.”

  Wilberforce had never been so pleased to hear anyone advocating war in his entire life—on whatever terms, in whatever language. But he couldn’t let it stand like that. Renewed war was, after all, somewhat missing the point.

  “There can still be peace with honor,” he said, stepping forward so he was standing next to Pitt. “You can withdraw from Europe immediately, break your ties over its people and ours, and end this. This country is at war with France; it doesn’t have to be at war with you. We came with an offer of our own, remember. The elixir. It can be made to work for you.”

  “And live like him?” The enemy laughed—a short, sibilant laugh, almost a hiss. “I would rather die.”

  “You don’t have to die. Neither do all those people on the battlefields right now. If you really want to come to some agreement with us—”

  “Oh, will you shut up, you tiresome little saint?” the enemy snapped.

  And then without warning the knife was plunged back into his ribs, ice-cold and red-hot, ripping through muscle and sinew and bone and internal organs. It was like nothing that had been in his memory or his imagining, because it was beyond imagining, and he was barely aware of screaming or collapsing to the ground or of anything else but agony.

  This was probably the end this time, he thought, and felt nothing but a longing for it to be over. He thought of Barbara and his children and hoped they would know he had been thinking of them.

  And then, once again, he heard Pitt’s voice. “I said”—it came above the sound of the roar of blood in his ears—“don’t you dare.”