by H. G. Parry
“Bonaparte’s brother-in-law was in command,” Christophe said before Toussaint could ask. His face was grim and ash-streaked. “Charles Leclerc. He sent word from Bonaparte that he meant no harm—the fleet was here to protect Saint-Domingue. We told him that you had ordered no warship be allowed to enter port. But they didn’t need to dock. They came out of the water. They attacked the fort.”
“Who came out of—?” Fina began to say, but Toussaint was speaking over her.
“Who burned the town?”
“I did,” Christophe said. “I wouldn’t let them have it. I told them that they wouldn’t enter the town until it was ashes, and then I would fight them on the ashes. When they kept coming forward, I told the fire-mages to burn it to the ground.”
Dessalines glared. “We could have held Le Cap against French soldiers!”
“You don’t understand,” Christophe said. “It isn’t French soldiers with him. Not the usual kind.”
“Who is it?”
Fina knew the moment before he said it. She remembered how carefully Leclerc had averted his eyes on the ship, how even his thoughts had skimmed the surface of his mission—not to thwart her, after all, but to avoid something he had no wish to see.
“The dead,” Christophe said. “The army of the dead are here.”
The three generals discussed it by candlelight in Toussaint’s tent. Fina followed them in, and nobody moved to stop her. Perhaps Christophe and Dessalines had simply ceased to see her, after all her years at Toussaint’s side by magic or in person.
“How can the dead be here?” Christophe asked. “Bonaparte needs the dead in Europe. He needs them to fight his wars.”
“They’ve made peace with Britain,” Dessalines said with certainty. “They must have. Or at least they’ve opened talks. They could never take the dead out of Europe otherwise. And the British would have been happy to allow them passage here with the dead. They want slavery back as much as France does.”
“We can’t possibly matter enough for Bonaparte to risk his greatest strength to take control of us,” Christophe said. “Not when we’ve made it clear that we mean to stay a French colony.”
“What risk?” Dessalines snorted. “He doesn’t think we can stand against the dead, it’s that simple. And it doesn’t matter to him that we’ll still be a French colony. It’s the color of our skin France hates. It’s what we represent. They never meant to let us stay free.”
Toussaint said nothing.
Fina said nothing either, and she didn’t look at Toussaint. But they were both thinking the same thing. There was another reason why Bonaparte would risk the army of the dead in Saint-Domingue. The stranger knew what they were planning. That had always been a risk—as long as the island was French, it was his territory, and secrets were difficult to keep. They had thought there would be very little he could do to stop them, not without going to very great lengths. Apparently, enslaving Jamaica was far more important than they had realized.
“You did right,” Toussaint said to Christophe at last. “Mage-fire is the only thing that can deter the dead. If they march forward, keep the flames building. If nothing else, we can leave them with nothing to conquer.”
“We can’t give up so easily,” Fina said. All she could see, in that moment, was the family she had glimpsed as she had traveled to Toussaint in the midst of the War of Knives. The children playing as their parents harvested their vegetables. It was ridiculous: they weren’t even legal; Toussaint had ordered everyone to the plantations even before that day. But she saw them. “This is our country.”
“We won’t give up,” Toussaint said. “Not ever. This is a delay in all our plans, nothing more. Let them invade for now. When the rainy season comes, the French soldiers will sicken and die as the British did. That will be the time to strike decisively. Until then, we make it as terrible for them as possible. Tear up the roads with shot; throw corpses into all the fountains; burn and annihilate everything. Let those who have come to reduce us to slavery have before their eyes the image of the hell they deserve.”
“The rain won’t deter the dead,” she said. “Not even hell will do that. And they won’t sicken and die.”
“Then we need to hope that Bonaparte recalls them. He can’t keep them here forever. If we draw this out long enough, he’ll need them back in Europe.”
“We can’t afford to draw this out!” she snapped, ignoring the curious glances of the two generals. “Toussaint, Jamaica can’t afford to wait. You know why it can’t.”
“It has to.” Toussaint had his armor on now. It was there in the shift of his stance, in the edge of steel in his voice that would brook no argument, even from her. “We have to hold this island before we can hold any other. Fina, there is a lot more than Jamaica at stake. If the dead don’t leave, the revolution could be over.”
The news reached Saint-Domingue in early April. France had indeed signed a treaty with Britain. For now, at least, Europe was at peace, so the West Indies could be at war. At the same time, Napoléon had officially reinstated slavery across the French Empire. The ships would resume their trade in human souls across the Atlantic; the colonies still in the grip of spellbinding and slave labor would remain so. This edict, as of yet, did not apply to Saint-Domingue, which had already been granted its liberty. Placide and Isaac Louverture had been sent to Toussaint in a show of good faith, bearing a letter that promised the French would deal fairly with the citizens of Saint-Domingue. But there was little doubt, as the French armies continued to march inland, what the ultimate fate of the colony was meant to be.
By then, half the country was aflame. Fina was under siege at Crête-à-Pierrot, a small fort that the British had left in the mountains bordering the Artibonite region. For the first time, she was at the side not of Toussaint, who was at war farther north, but of Dessalines. The day before Dessalines had ridden out to take command of the fort, Toussaint had summoned her to his side.
“I want you with him for this,” he had said.
“Why?” she asked—reasonably, but with real uneasiness. It wasn’t just that Toussaint had never asked her to be anywhere but beside him before. She trusted Toussaint now almost entirely, and the parts of him she didn’t trust she nonetheless loved. She didn’t trust Dessalines. She had been at the Siege of Jacmel during the War of Knives. She had been in the heads of men, women, and children as they surrendered and Dessalines had them murdered where they stood. He was brilliant, but his anger burned brightly, and it consumed without mercy.
“Because I think it will be important later that you are,” Toussaint said.
“Do you think that answer is enough for me to risk my life?”
“We’ve fought together for ten years,” Toussaint said. “You know me. Either it is, or it isn’t.”
And so she stood with Dessalines on the stone fort amid the rocky mountains each day and through many long nights, as gunfire flared and magic broke against the charmed walls and the French troops amassed in a fiery swarm beneath them. She watched Dessalines with mixed wariness and admiration as he rallied his magicians and common fighters alike.
“Take courage,” he called to the men and women manning the cannons. “They will fight well at first, but soon they will fall sick and die like flies. They will be forced to leave. And then I will make you independent. There will be no more whites among us.”
Fina suspected he would not have spoken so plainly of his desire to rid the island of the whites if Toussaint had been there. But the fort cheered. In the dark Dessalines’s fighters, wounded and starving and exhausted, sang songs of the French Revolution. They were all that was left of the Republic of Magicians now; the French soldiers who listened and laid siege to them outside, sick and miserable and thousands of miles from home, had become the servants of something else, and they knew it. Fina felt the aches of their limbs and the fear in their hearts, and she wasn’t afraid of them.
But the dead could not be stopped. They marched at the head of the French t
roops, ghastly and implacable, brimming with dark magic, and the worst of them was that every last one was a man or woman betrayed, a human being who had died in fear.
(Danton’s body had been one of the undead at the burning of Le Cap. Lucile Desmoulins was one of the wave who had taken the fort at Crête-à-Pierrot. Camille had been burned by mage-fire two years ago in Italy.)
Wherever the Revolutionary Army retreated, its magicians burned. At night the mage-fire made the paths as bright as day; in Le Cap, it was said it was possible to read a book by the light from the mountains. The dead marched on through the fires. Some of them crumpled and the shadows in them flew free as the flames burned their flesh; others continued to march as the flames flickered out and left them charred but whole. They never paused. The island blazed.
“Here is my opinion of this country,” Leclerc wrote to Napoléon from Saint-Domingue. “We must destroy all the Blacks of the mountains—men and women—and spare only children under twelve years of age. We must destroy half of those in the plains and not leave a single colored person in the colony who has won an epaulette. We must bring in new slaves, those who have never known an uprising. Only then will this colony be once more within our grasp.”
London
May 1802
Three weeks after the Treaty of Amiens, the House of Commoners met to debate the Act for the Freedom of Magic.
As far as Wilberforce was concerned, it was very simple. The Forester bracelets had been agreed upon as a temporary measure, to guard against Commoner uprisings while the war lasted. Now the war was over, it was time to do away with them. And, since there had been no sign of magical uprising for a very long time, it seemed to him the perfect time to propose that rather than rebraceleting the entire population with the old ones, the bracelets be abolished altogether.
It wasn’t that simple, of course. It was the result of years of careful planning and soul-searching amid the Clapham sect—and, more dangerously, it was the subject of outcry amid the Aristocrats. The king himself was firmly against it. The Temple Church was absolutely, unequivocally opposed. Forester called on Wilberforce in person the night before to ask that he reconsider. It was the first time they had spoken since Walmer Castle, but Forester had been at the House of Commoners frequently—whether to monitor public opinion of free magic or to make sure Pitt remained neutral, Wilberforce wasn’t sure. He respected Forester in his own way, but he couldn’t agree with him.
“You would do far more good for your cause if you argued that my bracelets remain,” Forester said. “Arrests for illegal magic have dwindled to almost nothing since their implementation. Without the war, we could bracelet the army as well, and they would dwindle to nothing at all.”
“And so would free magic,” Wilberforce returned. “I don’t want that. I never have.”
Forester shook his head. “You want an age of chaos,” he said. “And the worst of it is, you don’t even realize it.”
Pitt didn’t quite go so far as that, but he clearly shared Forester’s doubts.
“It wouldn’t change the law, as such,” Wilberforce pointed out to him. “Magic will still be illegal for Commoners on English soil. But losing the bracelets would be a step toward penalties relaxing further.”
“It’s a little more than that. Without the bracelets, it will be very difficult to detect magic being used at all. Unless someone actually sees and reports a Commoner using magic, they’ll probably be able to do so.”
“Well, if it’s magic small enough to pass undetected, then what of it? The line between Aristocratic and Commoner magicians will be blurred a little further.”
“And in the end?” Pitt said. “Exactly how blurred do you want the line to become?”
“Out of existence,” Wilberforce said, without hesitation. Pitt must, after all, have been expecting it, though it had remained unspoken between them all these years. “As it is in France, but by more peaceful means. Why should it be there at all?”
“It shouldn’t.” As Wilberforce predicted, he wasn’t surprised. “In principle. But I think what you want is more dangerous than you understand.”
“Your problem, Pitt, is that, with all the sympathy and compassion in the world, you do think of Commoner magicians as undesirable. You think the same of Aristocratic magicians. You can’t help it: you think it of yourself. I suspect, really, you think it of magic.”
“Possibly.” He obviously had no desire to dwell on the subject. “And, as I said, you’re perfectly right, in principle.”
“In principle. And in practice?”
“I wish you all the best,” Pitt said cautiously. “But I won’t be able to say very much in support of it, given Addington’s stance on free magic. I’m supposed to refrain from opposing his new government, and I do think that adding my voice would do little good in this case.”
Wilberforce had to be content with that.
Fortunately, a vast number of the House did not agree. Some of them were braceleted themselves, and tired of the relentless prejudice toward them that had been deepening over the French Revolutionary Wars. Some of them felt it was necessary, given that France had abolished Commoner restrictions on magic entirely, for the Commoners to be able to defend themselves and the country if the treaty failed and the French invaded. Many of them could simply see justice in what Wilberforce and the abolitionists were espousing. The world had changed since the Forester bracelets had been implemented. People were used to the idea of Commoner magic now—on the battlefield, in the navy, in France.
Wilberforce himself spoke for not quite three hours on the subject, with growing confidence as the walls caught up his argument and vibrated it back about the House. Like many of his arguments, it flitted from point to point and back again like a butterfly, but he felt fluent and passionate, and knew it was infecting others.
“I know a number of Commoners who wear bracelets,” he drew to a close. “Many of them are in this House; many more are in the gallery. They know their abilities are illegal. They know that they face punishments for using them that are still, despite the reforms undertaken by this House, harsh beyond reason. There is no need for them to be locked into shackles at birth that mark them as different, undesirable, and dangerous, and that will do so for their entire lives. They are none of those things. They are men and women born into Commoner families who happen to have magic in their blood. We are the House of Commoners. If we won’t speak for them, then who will?”
He sat down to scattered murmurs and applause, and Thornton next to him clapped him on the shoulder warmly.
Henry Addington stood up then. It had been a long time since Wilberforce had met with him socially. He was looking increasingly haggard of late, his smooth face cracking with the strains of the recent negotiations.
“And if we are to have Commoner magicians running around without bracelets,” he said, “how then can the Templars be expected to monitor illegal magic without an enormous waste of time and funds?”
Wilberforce hesitated, wondering if he should stand and answer or leave the question to one of the others. Before he could do either, however, he heard Pitt give a faint but distinct sigh and then get briskly to his feet. There was a murmur from the gallery.
“My honorable friend might also like to ask how we may be expected to monitor assault, robbery, murder, and any one of a hundred other non-magical crimes,” Pitt answered. He steadfastly didn’t look at Addington or meet his eyes. “It tends to take place through their victims reporting their occurrence, their perpetrators being named, and their guilty parties being investigated and charged. We do not insist that the population at large be made to wear bracelets to monitor their non-magical activities and impulses, any one of which could prove more harmful to our neighbors or our country than a wisp of stray magic from a distracted Commoner, and we are rarely made to expend undue time or expense in finding the perpetrators of any non-magical crime. By contrast, on the old bracelet system, the system to which the honorable gentleman is advocating a
return, more than thirty percent of incidents investigated by the Templars resulted in no conviction, and ten percent in no prosecution, because the infractions were either too minor to be deemed worth punishment or were clear instances of self-defense, and the bracelets were incapable of making that distinction. That is an extraordinary waste of valuable time and funds, both for the Templars and for the courts. A still greater waste of funds are the bracelets themselves, and always have been. The alchemical process used to produce them is both expensive and complicated; more so in the case of the Forester bracelets, but even in the final year of the old bracelet system, almost twelve percent of this country’s annual expenditure was dedicated to their production, while the country was in the grip of war. We are no longer in the grip of war, but I cannot be sanguine that we shall not soon feel that grip close about us again, and our economy needs desperately to recover. The most certain way of allowing it to do so, with regards to this issue, is for this nation to trust that its Commoners are no more likely to commit magical crime than they are any other crime, given the same deterrents: detection by normal means, conviction in a court of law, and fair and just punishment.”
It was a short speech by the standards of the House of Commoners; by Pitt’s standards, it barely qualified as a speech at all. But Addington was glaring at him as he sat back down, and the walls were faintly humming like a glass of crystal flicked with a finger.
Wilberforce stood himself, briefly. “My honorable friend said that far better than I could have. I’d like to add, too, that when Commoners come into Inheritances in adolescence, a large part of what makes them shy to come forward to report their abilities is the prejudice they face as bracelet wearers. Without bracelets, there is no visible sign of their status. I would not be surprised if many more will be willing to be registered under those conditions, making the Templars’ task paradoxically easier.”
It was a very near thing: when Wilberforce heard the votes against called at 104, he realized that he had been praying so hard that he had no idea how many were in the House at that moment, and looked instinctively at Pitt to see if this was promising. Pitt caught his eye, and a smile darted across his face almost too quickly to catch. Wilberforce’s spirits rose a moment before the votes for were called: 120.