by H. G. Parry
“I know,” Wilberforce said. “And I know you hold that trust every bit as sacred as we hold ours. I do believe you have the purest of motives at heart. But—”
“You don’t like the war. I know that. And I know you don’t like the attempts to take Saint-Domingue.”
“I don’t. I never have. I accept that it might be our only chance against this vampire, and I won’t oppose it. But—I know you believe in the system. But please remember that it is an imperfect system, and our job is not only to uphold it but to fight to change it. Don’t stop fighting.”
“I’ll never do that. But I need to fight one battle at a time. We are at war.”
“You say that all the time now.”
“Well,” Pitt said, “we happen to be at war all the time now.”
Within the week, a fleet of two hundred ships had been dispatched from Britain. On board were thirty thousand redcoats. It was the largest single naval operation in British history. It was on its way to Saint-Domingue.
Not long afterward, a stranger walked into Toussaint’s encampment.
Fina was cutting aloe leaves to make an ointment, as Toussaint had shown her. It was a hot day: flies settled on her fingers as she extracted the clear gel, and sweat dampened her brow. She didn’t know what made her glance up, if anything did at all, but when she did, her heart went cold.
The stranger was very tall, clad in a blue coat and white breeches. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, and his face was in shadow. The fact that a white man was in the camp was nothing unusual: there were many among Toussaint’s followers, and he always dealt generously with the white population of the island if they came to deal with him. But she knew this one. She had seen him before—only never clearly, and never when she was awake.
In the time it took her to rise, wiping her sticky hands on her skirt, Toussaint had greeted the stranger and invited him into his tent. It had closed behind them; from the look of it, they were there alone together. Toussaint’s current scribe, a scrawny young mulatto named Jean-Philippe, sat outside idly poking the dirt with his saber.
“Who is that man?” Fina asked him, doing her best to keep urgency from her voice.
Jean-Philippe glanced up, squinting in the sun. “I don’t know. He sent a message to the camp in the morning asking for an audience. No name. Toussaint seemed to be expecting him.”
Her stomach twisted. “Can I see him?”
“He’s not to be disturbed. And they might be in there awhile.”
She had promised Toussaint she would never enter his head, and he would know if she broke the promise. Instead, she turned to the canvas wall and threw her magic at the stranger. She could feel his mind and body: tense, coiled, powerful. Yet when she tried to grasp it, her magic slipped and recoiled. She scrabbled for purchase as she would at a slippery metal. Clearly, his head was open to her only in the hinterland where he talked to others. She gritted her teeth and cursed quietly.
Jean-Philippe frowned up at her. “Fina?”
“I’ll wait,” she said.
She sat cross-legged on the ground outside, ignoring the curious glance of the scribe. Her nerves strained to catch any hint of what was transpiring on the other side of the canvas; she felt as though she were trying to hear not only with her ears but with her eyes, her nose, her skin. It might have been a wall as thick as a stone fort.
It wasn’t long before the tent flap parted; perhaps a quarter hour, perhaps less. Toussaint emerged first. Then, as Fina scrambled to her feet, the stranger stepped past him. For the first time, Fina saw the owner of the voice in person and in the full light of day.
He paused beside her. She had time to take in his face: stark white, angular, confident. She saw the way his fair hair curled, a little darkened by sweat, under the brim of his hat; the way the tip of his nose was starting to peel in the sun; that his eyes were pale blue green, with long, fair eyelashes, and faint creases at the corners. He had time to take her in, too, but he didn’t. His glance slid over her, disinterested, in the manner of any master surveying his territory. She knew then, once and for all, that he didn’t care about their freedom.
At a nod from Toussaint, two of the nearby soldiers stepped forward to escort the stranger to the gates. He went quietly, inclining his head to Toussaint but not speaking. It didn’t matter. Fina knew what his voice sounded like.
“That was him, wasn’t it?” she said to Toussaint as soon as the stranger was out of earshot.
“Not now, Fina,” Toussaint said. He looked older than he had when he entered the tent.
Once she would have been content to be brushed aside. Not anymore. Not about this. “That was the voice in the night. The one that told you all to rise up. He was on the island.”
“Yes. You were right. He’s been here all along. He spoke to me last night, while I was asleep, and this time I heard him.”
“What did you promise him?”
“Safe passage back to France. He wants to return to his home. I’ve told him we can certainly attempt it, though Britain controls the seas.”
“And what else?”
He didn’t reply.
“That wouldn’t be enough for him. He wouldn’t come out of hiding after so long just for that. What deal did he make with you?”
“I told you, Fina. Not now.”
“Don’t tell me not now, Toussaint Louverture!” For once, she wasn’t pretending to be Molly or Clemency or Jacob in order to be brave. Her frustration was her own. It shot clear through all the years of fear and hiding and despair, and blazed. “I came over here because of that man. I was the one who heard him in the dark. I was the one who told you what he did to you all. I told you what I saw in his head, in France and in Jamaica. Whatever his plans are, they involve my people as well as yours. I have a right to know what they are.”
It was rare to see him angry, but his eyes flashed now. “You’re a soldier in this army.” He had a way of making his voice cut like a whip, and he used it. “You don’t decide what rights you have.”
“I’m a free woman.” In that moment, she believed it. “I’ve spent far too long being told what to do. I won’t take it from you.”
He might easily have struck her then. His jaw tightened, and a muscle in his cheek twitched involuntarily. Then he turned and disappeared back into his tent, motioning with a jerk of his head for his scribe to follow him.
Fina stared after him. She had been angry before in her life, many times. She had never been so disappointed. Toussaint was not some arrogant white man, nor was he one of those rebels who led by force because they lacked the imagination to lead any other way. He knew better than that; he knew her better than that. She was not foolish enough to think that he couldn’t have come so far without her, but he hadn’t done it without her. He had given her self-respect. It was no longer his to take away.
The following day, another white man came to the camp. This one caused more of a stir: he was a member of the French army. And no minor member of the French army either: this was Laveaux, the commander of the French forces in the north. Fina had been inside his head at times, and she grudgingly liked him. Unlike the English commanders, who tended to bribe and deceive as often as they fought, Laveaux met Toussaint in battle as an equal—she had felt his respect, and it was unfeigned. He had offered Toussaint an alliance once or twice before; Toussaint had always turned him down, but she knew the respect was mutual. But for him to be here now, in the midst of their camp, he had to have been invited.
His meeting with Toussaint was short. This time, Fina had no difficulty in seeing inside the tent: Laveaux’s gentle, courtly mind opened to her with ease. She felt his goodwill, and his delight; she saw Toussaint speaking to him, and she saw him smile. At the end, they clasped hands. Toussaint’s felt rough and strong through Laveaux’s gloves.
She was still standing outside the tent when the two of them came out. Laveaux’s eyes met hers for the briefest of moments, and he inclined his head on reflex. She wondered who he thought she was
. Unlike most of Toussaint’s fighters, she had never been seen on the battlefield.
Toussaint didn’t look at her, but he stopped beside her. They watched Laveaux ride away together. When he spoke, his voice was cooler than usual but not unfriendly. “Was he telling the truth?”
She didn’t bother to deny her presence in the tent. “Yes. Whatever he said to you, he meant it.”
Toussaint nodded.
By that evening, the news was out. Toussaint told his lieutenants, and it spread like wildfire. France, against all expectations, had upheld the commissioners’ promise to end slavery. As of now, every man, woman, and child on Saint-Domingue was legally free. And, as of that very afternoon, Toussaint had broken with Spain and transferred his allegiance to the French forces against the Spanish and English.
The news was greeted with mixed joy and consternation by the camp. In one day, their enemies had become their allies; their freedom had been given to them months after they had taken it for themselves. Nobody quite knew what to think.
Fina said nothing. As night fell, she walked to the edge of the camp, where the tussocky ground gave way to steep crags and cacti. The ground was still warm from the day’s heat, and a gentle wind tugged at her skirt. She knew the stranger wasn’t far away.
If she and the stranger were indeed enemies, she thought, she now had one advantage. They had been face-to-face, and she had looked at him. He had not looked at her.
Saint-Domingue/London
July 1794
It began with a battle.
A few weeks after the stranger’s visit, Fina was shaken roughly awake by Dessalines.
“We’re taking the British fort,” Dessalines said. “At Môle Saint-Nicolas. Toussaint told me to bring you.”
She stared at him for a few moments, uncomprehending. He shifted uneasily. Toussaint’s people were afraid of her stare, she’d discovered over time. Some were superstitious of her power; others were more practically afraid that she was slipping behind their eyes. She’d heard whispers that her gaze was eerily blank—and it was, she knew. That had nothing to do with her magic, except that its resistance to spellbinding had forced her into the long habit of letting nothing show on her face. Her stillness had been for survival then; now she found it gave her an unexpected power.
“Not all the way into battle,” he said, as if she’d asked. “Just to the edges. He wants you to be able to watch from the cliffs, and stop men in their tracks if the occasion calls for it.”
“I’ll come,” she said, more relieved than she would admit. It wasn’t that she was afraid of battle anymore, but the implications of Toussaint breaking his promise to her without a word after their argument would have been frightening. For that one moment, she had wondered if he now wanted her dead. The fact that the thought could even cross her mind frightened her most of all.
Fort George, as it was now called, had once been a French fort, manned by the remnants of white colonists attempting to take back the island. When the British had landed, some nine months ago, the colonists had surrendered with relief, even with gratitude. The fort stood on the brink of a high cliff grown over with inhospitable trees, overlooking dazzling seas. A path led down to the bay of yellow-white sand, where some of the British ships remained docked, but there was no real track over the mountains. The rebel armies struggled through and around the undergrowth, Toussaint on his black horse at their head. At his side, two fire-mages walked. They clapped their hands, and a line of flame shot from their palms toward the closed door of the fort.
As the doors shattered, Fina closed her eyes and slipped into the head of the enemy. It was like ducking beneath the surface of the ocean: a silent frenzy of color and movement. All around her were heat and gunfire and swords.
“Stop,” she said, over and over. “Stop now. Stop.”
The battle did not last long. Perhaps half an hour, perhaps less. The British numbers were far greater, but so many of them were ill and unable to fight, and the attack had taken them by surprise. They surrendered the fort willingly. Toussaint granted them permission to leave in their ships and even ordered his own men to help carry the wounded and sick down to the bay.
Fina came down as the last of the British were leaving. She came stumblingly after so long out of her body, her vision barely feeling as though it belonged to her. She scratched her arm on a thorn and felt it as though it happened to somebody else. The sensation wasn’t helped by the surreal sight of the British filing down onto the beach, prodded encouragingly by strong African men with swords.
Dessalines grinned at her, his unease melted in his exhilaration. “It’s ours,” he informed her. “We’ve taken it.”
“We’ll never hold it,” Fina said. “He must know that.”
“He knows. He says we don’t need to hold it for long.”
She wondered. “Do you know what he’s planning?”
Dessalines laughed. “Nobody ever knows what Toussaint is planning.”
More than four thousand miles across the ocean, the stars were out over London, and the streets were empty of all but the most determined drunkards and pickpockets. Westminster lay behind a curtain of fine summer rain; droplets rippled in the wind, catching the lamplight in cascading, ever-changing shapes. Rain soaked the battlements of the Tower of London, where Thomas Clarkson sat reading old ships’ manifests by candlelight. It fell on Wilberforce’s house at Old Palace Yard, and on the Houses of Parliament, both abandoned now for the long recess. Wilberforce was in the Lake District, sound asleep under broader and moodier skies.
It lashed against the windows of Number 10 Downing Street and startled Pitt awake. It usually took far more than a light sprinkling of water against glass to do that; he admitted it to himself, even as he was also forced to admit that his heart was beating unusually fast and the remnants of dreams twisted uncomfortably in his mind. He had been restless and uneasy all evening, with no cause that he could determine. The magic in his veins had burned distractingly, flashing bloodlines across his vision like fragments of glass. The hours before bed had been filled with conversation, work, letters, and arrangements for travel to Holwood the following day, so it had been relatively easy to push his feelings down and let his thoughts take over; now, in the dark of night, it was more difficult. The house was too large and empty, and his sleep not quite empty enough. He was sorely tempted to get up, light a candle, and read by the window until the sky grew bright enough to be considered morning and he could start his journey out of London. But he was tired and not given to indulging vague feelings of dread, so instead he told himself not to be ridiculous, settled down firmly, and closed his eyes.
He wasn’t aware of falling asleep.
There was no garden, and no crooked street. The scene around him was as close to nothingness as his mind could conceive. Darkness. A faint susurration of wind and what could be splashing waves. The occasional hard glint on the horizon that could be a star behind clouds, or the reflected light of a star on water. The air had the salt tang of the sea.
“William Pitt,” a voice said. It was a pleasant voice: light, educated, beautifully enunciated. The kind of voice that would carry weight in the House of Commoners. “The younger William Pitt, of course. I remember your father. Our territories had a sort of war when he was prime minister—nothing like this. You were conceived and born in the middle of it. I wonder if that’s why the magic in your blood ignited the way it did, after so many generations.”
It wasn’t what it said. It was the fact that it was here, talking to him, and what that meant. There was no pretending anymore that the enemy had no idea what he was, or didn’t care. Some terrible threshold had at last been crossed.
“How are we speaking?” Pitt asked, as calmly as he could. In the waking world, that was very calmly indeed. Here, in whatever hinterland of thoughts and dreams they inhabited, it was much harder. “I know what you are. Britain is outside your territory. Even if you are indeed a full-blooded vampire, you can only enter the minds of its s
ubjects when they step onto your soil, or afterward with their express invitation. Clarkson gave it. I haven’t.”
“You’re not a British subject, William Pitt,” the enemy said. “You’re a blood magician—of a sort. And I haven’t entered your mind. Our minds are meeting halfway. This is a parley.”
“I have no desire to parley with you.”
“Nor I with you. I want to warn you not to break the rules.”
In his sleep, Pitt frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve seen your ships on their way here. Somehow, you’ve found out where I am, and you mean to kill me. I can only assume that Robespierre was involved, or rather someone close to him. He has been my one weak link all these years. But it doesn’t work like that. Perhaps you don’t realize, going entirely from books as you are, but you must kill me in person or not at all. Otherwise, you confine yourself to the capture of my territory, please. Those are the rules.”
“What rules? What do you want?”
“Do you really not know?” The darkness constricted around them. “I want my birthright. I want what was taken from me and my bloodline three hundred years ago.”
“Wilberforce was right, wasn’t he? You survived the Vampire Wars. You were one of the royal families.”
“I was a child. A child who lived in a castle in Marseilles. My parents had a faint connection to the royal bloodline. The Templars broke through the shadows guarding the door and slaughtered them before my eyes. Did you know our blood looks the same as any other spilled onto wet stone? Perhaps you’ll see it for yourself one day.”
