by H. G. Parry
“The commissioners say that slavery no longer exists,” Toussaint corrected. “They have no power to make it true. It would need to be confirmed by the National Convention in Paris, and they’ll never allow it. They need this colony now to support their war with Europe. In the meantime, things will go on as they ever have. If we want freedom, we need to take it for ourselves. Is the army ready?”
Dessalines smiled. Fina didn’t know him very well, but he had never shown any interest in showing mercy to the plantation owners. “It is.”
“Then tell them to prepare to move on Fort Dauphin.”
Fina waited until Dessalines had moved away. “Are you sure? Perhaps the Convention will support their ruling. Perhaps they have already.”
“If I hear that’s the case, I might reconsider.” The sternness faded from his face as he turned to her. “I hope it is. But for now—it’s taken a long time to build a relationship with Spain. I won’t throw it away on so slight a promise as the French commissioners can give. As it is, I suspect this comes from Sonthonax alone. He means well, but he has it in his head that he can come in and save us, and he doesn’t understand the way this country works. It’s dangerous.”
It made sense, of course. Toussaint always made sense. But deep down, she couldn’t help but feel a stirring of disappointment. She understood why Dessalines had smiled. He wanted revenge, and for him that meant death. But there were different kinds of revenge, and she was sick of death. Perhaps it would be better for France to admit they were wrong and have to surrender to their former slaves.
But Fort Dauphin, at least, was not surrendering.
Her part in the conflict was over: she had given Toussaint the surrounding area’s weaknesses and strengths, and he had taken advantage of both. In theory, she could rest now, and wait for the army to return or not. But instead, she closed her eyes, found her magic, and reached for the battle. She found the town at once, a surge of panic and confusion and flame; she cast herself behind the eyes of the combatants on both sides, throwing out her power at random and not much caring whom it ensnared. They would feel nothing, beyond perhaps a sense of something uncanny that they had no time for in the midst of combat. She couldn’t enter Toussaint’s head—she had promised him, and she respected that promise. But for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, she needed to watch over him.
Fort Dauphin now was a ball of fire. Men and women fought in the ash. The man Fina inhabited now was white, his arms clad in the French uniform as he brought his rifle up to fire. His muscles burned, and the heat throbbed in his skull. His ankle stabbed faintly with every turn—an old injury, or a fresh one, she couldn’t tell. Dessalines cut his way through a handful of men; a French soldier rushed toward him, sword waving, then fell back gasping. Dessalines’s magic inflicted pain at a glance. It was harmless, but crippling. Nobody had heard of an ability like it, but then nobody had heard of an ability like Fina’s either.
In Toussaint’s mind, battles were always clear lines—she didn’t need to actually enter his head to see that. He explained to her, when he had time, the reasoning behind each attack and strategy. Through others’ eyes, battles were a dust-filled, chaotic mess. They frightened her—not just the flash of blades and the spill of blood, or the faces distorted by silent screams, but the rage and bloodlust bubbling beneath the surface of those whose bodies she inhabited on both sides. It was primal and dangerous, like the magic that spilled from the unknown voice she had come to find. It frightened her because she had felt it in her own veins, the night that Molly died.
Toussaint.
Fina saw him through enemy eyes, mounted on his black horse, Caesar. Although there was no sound through her magic, his mouth was moving, and her mind supplied his voice urging his people into battle. The man whose head she inhabited brought up his rifle. His muscles were hesitant, his view wavering. It wasn’t just that Toussaint was too far away for a clear shot. He was afraid. Fina felt the roar of his heart, and her own exulted. He wouldn’t fire.
And then she saw the other Frenchman. He was at the back of the same low wall that sheltered the soldier Fina inhabited. Fina could see him easily: he wasn’t hiding from his own army. But Toussaint, looking out to the battle, hadn’t seen him. And the man was carrying a rifle.
No.
Toussaint whirled Caesar around tightly, so that his face came into view through the haze. His eyes were narrowed against the noise and the smoke, and his jaw was set. His face was distorted by the hatred of the man she inhabited, but it didn’t matter. Fina knew it.
He couldn’t die. Not now, not like this. He couldn’t.
The white man brought up his rifle. A few miles away, cross-legged in a tent, something happened inside Fina’s head, or her heart.
She remembered being six, in the hold of a ship, screaming in her head and knowing she would never scream aloud again.
She remembered being twelve, watching the bandits from the hills storm the plantation, screaming in her head for them to see her and take her away.
She remembered her friend Augustus, whirling without warning to strike the overseer. They had taken him and burned him alive. He had not been able to scream either.
She remembered Molly.
She was free of the spell now. Her army was taking the town of the enemy. And she had come into her magic.
She didn’t let herself think. There was room for only magic in her head, no room even for that, as it spilled out of one man and caught the other like a net. Her surroundings blurred, roared, then settled into the view from the rifleman’s eyes: the sight of the rifle, pointed at Toussaint as he sat with naked saber drawn on the back of his horse.
“No!” she cried, and was surprised to hear her own voice. “No, no, no!”
The man stopped. It might have been to aim before firing, but she could see the barrel, and it was not quite there. An inch away, less; it might still hit, even kill, but the man’s finger was loose about the trigger, and the rifle was not where he wanted it to be. Besides, she could feel him. Beneath the surface, behind his eyes, she felt the man’s confusion and fear as he struggled to move. His biceps strained uselessly under his jacket; his teeth gritted; his eyes widened. She remembered the feeling well. She had felt it every day of her life from the age of six to the age of twenty-seven.
“Stop it,” she said. “Stop it right now.”
Her hold lasted perhaps five seconds, if that. In that time, Toussaint turned his horse; she saw his familiar face meet her eyes, which weren’t really hers at all but the rifleman’s. With barely a flicker of alarm, he dropped the reins, drew his pistol with his left hand, and aimed. Fina heard the concussion, felt the hot sting of shot, and gasped. The man’s chest shattered in an explosion of pain. He fell; she fell with him. The ground beneath them was slick with blood.
As the rifleman’s eyes grew dim, the wooden gate to the east of the town shattered with a shower of hot ash and sparks. Fina ducked instinctively, covering her head and squeezing her eyes shut. When she opened them, her tent awaited her. She fell to the ground, shaking, exhausted, exultant. Even from there, she could hear the sounds of gunfire and swords and screams.
That evening, Toussaint addressed the crowds of free blacks and slaves that had gathered in the square of Fort Dauphin. His voice rang out, strikingly deep and resonant from such a slight frame.
“Brothers and friends, I am Toussaint Louverture; perhaps my name has made itself known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want liberty and equality to reign in Saint-Domingue. I work to bring them into existence. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause.”
It was the first time he had used the name Louverture: “the opening.” Nobody quite knew what it meant, but they all listened.
Fina didn’t see Toussaint until the following night. The troops returned in the late afternoon, but Toussaint himself had many to see and talk to before he had time to spare for her. She found him at last under the leaves of a stubby palm tree, in a gu
lly on the outskirts of the camp. Caesar was tied to one of the branches; Toussaint groomed him with sure, firm strokes. The horse’s coat gleamed black in the soft darkness.
“I did it,” she announced without preamble. She expected Toussaint would know what she meant, and she was not disappointed.
“I thought you did.” If he was exhausted, as he must have been, it showed only in a faint sigh as he straightened to look at her. His mouth twisted into its familiar smile. “At least, when I turned and looked down the barrel of a rifle, with an enemy frozen behind it, I suspected I was seeing the touch of somebody’s magic. I also suspected it was somebody who liked me.”
“I could do it again.” Fina slid the rest of way into the gully with a scree of pebbles, causing Caesar to snort in alarm and toss his head. She laid her hand on his nose to calm him. “I know the feel of it now.”
“Good,” Toussaint said. “We might need it.”
He was so much less excited than she had expected that she wondered if her own excitement had less to do with tactical advantage than it did with personal revenge. Her revenge hadn’t been the man’s death; that had been terrible. But she had been told to stop so often, and forced to obey first by magic and then by fear. Now she had made someone listen to her.
But even if that were the case, there was a tactical advantage to her magic—there always had been, and it had just increased. And she had saved Toussaint’s life. Under normal circumstances, some excitement was surely warranted.
“What is it?” she asked. “Do you think we should treat with France after all?”
Toussaint looked surprised, then rueful. “No, not that. I meant what I said yesterday: the commissioners can’t be trusted to bring about the end of slavery.”
“Then what is it?” she asked. “You’re worried about something.”
“Didn’t I tell you to stay out of my head?”
She smiled, knowing he didn’t mean it. “I don’t need to be inside your head. It’s written on your face.”
“It isn’t, you know.” He sounded thoughtful. “At least, not for most people to read.”
“Well,” she said with a shrug. “I suppose I know what faces look like when things are going on behind them.”
There was another, softer brush on the ground next to them; Fina picked it up and joined Toussaint at Caesar’s side. She ran the bristles gently over the horse’s neck, tracing the arch of the strong muscles underneath. Fina had never known any horses before coming to Saint-Domingue; she had learned how to ride through slipping behind the eyes of some of Toussaint’s men, and now she felt at home with them. Her magic couldn’t reach inside animals’ heads, but she stretched out her magic to Caesar all the same, like a caress. She felt something flicker, as though on the tips of her fingers: a gray-white world, and contentment.
“My worry is what will become of the land we’ve gained,” Toussaint said after a while. She turned to him in surprise—not at his words, but that he had spoken in their shared language, as he rarely did these days. “When we rode back today, I saw swaths of sugarcane fields lying unharvested. We need to go back to working them, exactly as we did before they were liberated. I’ve given instructions about this, many times. But too often, people won’t listen. They don’t understand that freedom doesn’t mean freedom from labor.”
“They understand that they need to grow food for themselves and their families,” Fina pointed out, in the same language. The familiar tongue made her bolder than usual. “But you want them to work the same hours and produce the same harvests as they did when they were slaves.”
“This was the richest colony in the Caribbean before the uprising. It could be again—only this time not for the white plantation owners, but for us. If we can produce the same crops we always have, then we can trade with England and America and Spain. We can prove to France that a colony doesn’t need slavery to be successful.”
“I don’t see why we need to prove anything to people who don’t even think we’re human.”
“Well. It would be helpful in forcing them to come to terms with us.” He said it lightly, but she didn’t smile. It was too close to the truth. “It isn’t about proving what we can be. It’s about becoming what we can be. Saint-Domingue can be a nation, if our people would just let it.”
“They don’t see the same Saint-Domingue you do,” Fina said. She was learning, now, how to read the differences between what various eyes saw and the various feelings those sights stirred. “When they look at those fields, they don’t see crops that need to be harvested. They only see a place they hate, and that hated them back.”
“And do you see it?” It wasn’t a plea for understanding; he sounded merely curious. But he wanted to know. She thought carefully before she responded.
“I see a lot of Saint-Domingues, through a lot of different eyes,” she said. “I like what you see. I want to see it too, I really do. But I was never a slave here. If you asked me to go back to my old plantation, as a free woman, and work it exactly as I used to for the good of your vision, I’m not certain I could do it.”
Toussaint nodded. “You saved my life today,” he said, as though it were a reply. “I won’t forget it.”
“It was nothing special.” Inwardly, she glowed. “It was a battle. Probably many people saved your life, at many points.”
“And I hope I won’t forget any of them. But in particular, I won’t forget you. You broke the bounds of your magic for me.”
“I don’t really know the bounds of my magic.” It was something she thought about often but had never voiced. “I’ve never seen magic like mine, even now. In our army we have mesmers, and fire-mages, and alchemists. You have weather magic of a kind, even if it isn’t very useful.”
“Thank you,” he said dryly.
“But what kind of magic is mine? Why hasn’t it been seen before?”
“You’re still asking your magic to answer to a name,” Toussaint said. “Magic doesn’t belong to categories. Mesmerism, fire magic, weather magic—those are terms invented by white men, who like to bind things. Magic can’t be bound. And the names they have are the kinds of magic common in Europe. Africa has its own kinds of magic—and because they’re not recorded in the same way, they seem more mysterious to Europeans.” He straightened and stretched his shoulders. “Still. I have a theory about you—and about Dessalines, whose abilities also defy categories.”
She tilted her head to look at him. “What is it?”
“You two were both spellbound from a young age. We can’t know when Dessalines’s magic awakened, since it didn’t show until he was freed, but I would guess, like you, it came later rather than at birth. I think that the spellbinding affected your magic and made it grow in ways it wouldn’t normally. Spellbinding is designed to control the mind and open it to mesmerism; both of you have abilities that are strongly linked to the mind. Dessalines can make the body feel pain; you can slip into another’s body and see through its eyes.”
“And control it,” she reminded him. “If I can do more like what I did today, then I can control bodies as well. Exactly like spellbinding.”
“I think both of you will find you can do more than you think,” Toussaint said. He paused. “The voice didn’t speak in this battle, I suppose?”
The question startled her, not least because she’d been thinking of it herself. “No. Why?”
“It was a decisive conflict, and one we almost lost. I thought perhaps it might want to help us again.”
“We didn’t need any voice,” she said.
“We may well, in the coming months. British ships have been sighted not far distant. It looks like only a handful of soldiers, but they want the island. And many of the planters here will support them in exchange for a return to slavery—especially now that the commissioners have turned so decidedly against them.” He shrugged. “But perhaps the owner of the voice isn’t here any longer.”
“He’s here,” she said. She didn’t need to stop and think about i
t. “I hear him every night, in snatches. But he’s talking to people a very long way away now. I don’t know if he thinks about us at all.”
“Perhaps he thinks it’s our job to free ourselves now.”
“I don’t think that’s the reason.” She hesitated. “I’m not certain, these days, if his help is something we want.”
“You came for his help in the first place, did you not? That was what drew you across the sea.”
“At first. But I’ve heard more of him since—and seen him. It isn’t like my other magic; I can’t see through his eyes, even when I try. I see him in his own mind, or somewhere just outside it, talking to others. My mind can leave my body, too, and I think often, when he leaves his, I go with him. He’s more powerful than me, so he draws me into his head without him even being aware of it. He’s never addressed me, or anyone here, but… There’s a man in France he talks to. I can hear them, but only in parts, like you’d overhear a conversation through a wind.”
She had his full attention now. “Who does he talk to?”
“I never hear the name. He’s a white man; when I see him, he looks very little and scared. He must be someone important in the Convention, though, from what the stranger asks of him. And he’s what they call a necromancer.”
“The whites kill what they call necromancers.” Toussaint’s face was troubled. “They fear them. Even in Africa, it’s very rare for a person to be able to raise the dead. The houngans here consider it a particular gift from the loa—I don’t believe there’s been one on this island in living memory.”
“Well, this little Frenchman is a necromancer. And the stranger is asking him to do something terrible.”
“You don’t know what it is?”
She shook her head. In the circle of light from the campfire, not twenty feet away, men laughed and drank from the casks of Spanish wine their allies had gifted them. Their song rose with the thread of smoke, joyous and angry.
