A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  “Yes,” he said at last. “Yes, and you. I’m told you can show us where this mysterious enemy might be found, and that we are to take your guidance, Miss Fina. But as soon as that has been accomplished, I want you, too, to return to the orlop deck. This is not going to be any place for a woman, even a battle-mage.”

  Fina didn’t point out that Midshipmage Dove was a woman as well as a battle-mage. Unlike Hester, she had no desire to argue for her right to remain in more danger than necessary. As she had told Hester, she knew what it was like to die.

  “Aye, Captain,” she said, and was gratified to see Nelson look surprised.

  “The enemy ships will be in range soon,” he told her. “I’m told your magic works at a great distance. I suggest you begin to look now.”

  Hester gave her a quick, fierce hug before she disappeared belowdecks. “Good luck.”

  “And you,” Fina returned. She forgot sometimes how much younger Hester was than her, and how much less she had seen. Hester, deep down, still thought that battle was exciting.

  Fina’s magic found the enemy ships at once. They were a flurry of active minds, almost identical to those on the British ships. When she closed her eyes and cast out her magic, it snatched at once for them. She didn’t trouble to settle into any of them, just lit on them long enough to know that they weren’t her target. Thirty-three ships; five more than their own fleet. It was dizzying, like being immersed in flickering light and being the flickering light at once. Her magic strained at the mental whiplash.

  Just once, she saw the dead. They stood on the deck of one of the ships, as she had seen them stand so many times at Saint-Domingue, their insubstantial shadow-heads drifting above their tattered uniforms and pale human flesh. She caught only a glimpse, through the eyes of a sailor who quickly shuddered and looked away, but there they were.

  They were on their way across the sea to England at last.

  The ships were a lot closer when her eyes snapped open, and the sound of the beat to quarters was much louder. The thud of booted feet pounded in the base of her skull.

  Nelson was watching her, Captain Hardy at his side. “Well?”

  “Stop talking,” she said, and didn’t realize how it sounded until Kate laughed. In truth, it wasn’t really the talking that she minded. It was Nelson’s tone: impatient, imperious, tensed to the breaking point. It was understandable, and certainly Nelson was the least of her problems. But her body associated that tone in a British voice with imminent threat, and her heart quickened.

  She breathed the sea air deep, ignored her growing panic, and reached out again. The stranger had to be somewhere. Her magic roamed the ship, fluttered over the French soldiers, dipped in and out of consciousnesses primed for war.

  There. It wasn’t a presence she felt after all, but an absence: her magic touched a mind and rebounded, flailed, failed to find a purchase. Her blood chilled; the shiver propelled her eyes open.

  “That one,” she said.

  Nelson followed her pointing finger with a frown. “The Redoubtable?”

  “If that’s the Redoubtable, yes. I don’t know the name.”

  He glanced at Hardy, who shrugged. “We need to cut the line somewhere, sir. I don’t think we’ll do that without running on board one of the French ships. The Redoubtable will do as well as any.”

  “Then give the orders,” Nelson said. “Head for the Redoubtable, full speed ahead. As soon as we’re in range, open fire.”

  Kate turned back to her battle-mages. “Right, Mr. Sinclair. Let’s give them a wind.”

  The Victory moved forward.

  No amount of slaughter through the eyes of others had prepared Fina for being in the thick of a naval battle. She had seen the chaos of war before, from every possible angle. She knew about fear and pain and death. She knew how gunpowder and magic filled the sky, how it became hard to breathe through smoke and dust and terror, how weapons became slippery with sweat and blood. But she had never realized the noise. Through her magic, battle was eerily silent; now, as the Victory drew within weapons range of the French fleet, the explosions of cannon fire and rifle shots were deafening. The ship recoiled in the water; she stumbled and barely kept her feet. Her heart was on fire in her chest, and it was her own heart this time, not another’s. If she died this time, it would be her own death.

  “Don’t concern yourself with the battle,” Kate said. She must have read the look on Fina’s face. “Do what you’ve come to do. Reeves will keep the bullets away.”

  “I shall do my best, at least,” Reeves said darkly. His hands were poised, reaching for the metal that was his to deflect.

  These people were still too new for Fina to entirely trust them. But she had no choice. As the Victory crunched alongside the Redoubtable, she closed her eyes.

  It was easier to look through multiple eyes than take possession of one person and move them about the ship. She dipped in and out of French heads as she had done on the battlefields on Saint-Domingue, but this time she wasn’t looking at the battle itself. She searched around it, scanning the faces on the French ship for the sight of the one face she couldn’t slip behind. Decks and cannons and soundless shouts whirled in front of her vision; she slipped on and shrugged off others’ bodies like a dizzying array of coats. She saw the deck of the Victory through the eyes of the sharpshooters, the cannons through the eyes of the gunners, wounds in terrible detail through the eyes of the surgeon. She saw cabin boys, old men, young men, flushed and fearful and bleeding and determined. Not the stranger. Not yet. Not him either. Almost—

  “Look out!”

  Fina blinked back to herself just in time to see the air crackle around her: Reeves’s metalmancy again. In the time she had been away, however long that was, the deck of the Victory had been entirely transformed. It was a chaos of smoke and gunfire; the mizzenmast creaked precariously, and the air was thick with shouts. She glanced at Reeves and nodded her gratitude.

  He nodded back tightly. Sweat beaded his brow, and he was pale with strain. “God, this is madness. We’re an open target here. Nelson’s nearly been hit three times.”

  “Can you turn around their own cannons?”

  “Are you telling me how to use my own magic?” He answered his own question before she could. “They’re shot through with alchemy now, like ours. I can’t take hold of them. Whatever you’re supposed to be doing—”

  She didn’t trouble to answer, just turned back to the ship. She scanned the men running like ants amid the crumpled deck, preparing to cast out her magic again.

  And then she saw him: not with another’s eyes, but with her own. The quarterdeck of the Redoubtable was hard against the Victory, and he stood there. Sun had bleached his hair gold and bronzed his skin so that he looked little different, superficially, from any of the other French sailors. What set him apart was his stillness. He stood without so much as a hand on the railing as the ship lurched and waves crashed around him, the barest shift of his feet keeping him steady. His attention was fixed on the Victory. She knew, without a trace of a doubt, that he was looking for her too.

  “That’s him,” she said—quietly at first, then louder. “That’s him! Admiral!”

  Nelson was by her side at once, harried yet controlled. “Where?”

  She pointed. The admiral squinted with his good eye. “That man in the gray coat?”

  “It’s him.”

  “He looks just like anyone else.”

  “So does Napoléon. What did you expect him to look like?”

  “When have you seen—?” He abandoned the question; perhaps he didn’t even realize he’d spoken it aloud. “We’ll prepare to board. He isn’t going anywhere. But I’ll tell the sharpshooters to aim for him above all others.”

  “I can try for him, sir,” Reeves offered. “There are shots firing in all directions. I should be able to turn one in his direction.”

  Nelson hesitated for the barest second: it would, after all, mean leaving the men and women on deck vulnerable
to gunfire. “Do it.”

  Fina was still watching the stranger. His eyes swept the deck, ignoring Nelson as he had once ignored her. Then, at once, he saw her. She saw the moment it happened, and felt rather than saw the smile flicker over his face. In a burst of reckless bravado far more like Hester than her, she raised her hand and waved at him. He inclined his head respectfully.

  That very moment, a shout came from the crow’s nest.

  “Kraken. Kraken to starboard.”

  Kate’s magic was flying high above the sea. It was what ordinary sailors could never understand about the battle-mages, the part that made it easy to be brave: when the cannon fire came and the ship shattered around them, they weren’t there. Her feet stood on deck, but she soared with the wind and surged with the sea; she moved clouds and sails and sky.

  And then she felt it. The darkness in the water, the parting of the waves, the sense of something terrible and unnatural gliding toward them.

  The wind dropped; beside her, Sinclair rushed to pick up the slack. “Careful!” he yelped.

  She drew a breath and the wind rose again, but her soul was no longer with it. Her heart, which had been racing so fast and so joyfully, had stopped beating entirely.

  The kraken.

  Behind the line of French ships, now cut into three and surrounded by British ships, the sea was bubbling. In all her life beside the water, Kate had never seen such a thing before. She might not have noticed it now but for the peculiar calmness of the ocean in between the vessels. Something dark moved beneath the water—the size of a small ship, a large ship, as large as them, larger.

  It broke the water.

  The kraken was a massive creature, a small island of crags and scales and thrashing tentacles. Water poured from its back, and its head split into a sharp-toothed mouth. The waves from its coming threw the Victory hard to port; that, and the shouted orders to turn about, might have been all that saved them. Kate stumbled for balance, caught herself against the railing, and was doused in a sluice of water; she came up, gasping and blinking salt from her eyes, to see the kraken’s teeth close about Royal Sovereign. The ship was crunched in two and pulled beneath the waves. The water closed over the kraken’s head. It was so fast that it was difficult to believe it had happened.

  “Dear God,” Nelson said, very quietly.

  Kate stared after the boiling seas, her magic swirling about her only from sheer habit. The shattered mast was drifting to the surface now, and a few broken bodies swirled in the water. This, then, was how Christopher had died. In a frenzy of teeth and churning of waves, too fast even to scream.

  Hardy was by Nelson’s side all of a sudden, a heavyset guardian angel. “We have to withdraw, sir,” he said. “It’ll be back up any second. One thrash of a tentacle and we could lose half the fleet.”

  “We’re embedded pretty thoroughly amid the French ships,” Nelson said. He wasn’t arguing, or not quite. In the middle of terror and chaos, he was just thinking. “Their kraken would have a job to take our ships without damaging their own.”

  “With respect, Captain, I don’t think they’ll be able to hold it back. We need to go.”

  “We can’t!” Fina said. It was the first time she had spoken since the kraken broke the waves; Kate hadn’t even known whether she was listening or still roaming the enemy fleet. Her eyes were alive again as she turned to Nelson. “You know why we’re here. If we don’t capture the man on that ship, this whole venture will have been for nothing. Everything will have been for nothing.”

  “Not for nothing,” Hardy snapped. Of course, he didn’t know what he was talking about. “We’ll have broken up the French invasion of England. They’ll have to work to regroup—”

  Fina turned to Nelson and forced a deep breath before she spoke. “Admiral. If I hold the kraken still, can your people drive the ship close enough to kill it?”

  Nelson stared at her. “Are you saying you can hold it still?”

  She didn’t dignify that with a response. “Are you saying you could kill it?”

  “It might be difficult to raise the cannons high enough to fire from any sort of distance…” he said slowly.

  Kate spoke up then. It wasn’t her place, but she couldn’t have held back if she had wanted to. “I can get you close enough. If you let me, I can guide the ship as close as you need.”

  Nelson glanced at her—startled, skeptical. “Are you sure?”

  She had never been more sure of anything in her life. It was why she had come. This was why she was here, now, in a place that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago.

  “It killed my brother,” she said. “I can do it.”

  “Yes,” Nelson said, as if to himself. “Yes, sometimes magic does work like that. But still, the cannons might not…” He broke off, as if struck by a thought, then set his chin. “Never mind that. Yes. If you can give us that opportunity, Miss Fina, I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure it isn’t wasted.”

  “Then get ready,” Fina said. “I’ll stop it for you.”

  “You can’t,” Hardy said. “We’ve had our best mesmers try to wrest control of this thing away from the French. It doesn’t work. Whatever Napoléon’s done to it—”

  “I’m not one of yours, and I’m not a mesmer,” Fina said. “Please trust me.”

  Nelson was very white; Kate wondered, briefly, if he had been hurt in the wave from the kraken after all. But he met Fina’s gaze, and he nodded.

  “Mr. Hardy,” he said, “prepare to turn the ship about. When the kraken surfaces, we need to get close. I’ll take the wheel myself.”

  Hardy opened his mouth, then closed it again. He gave Fina a look of pure fury, but he obeyed.

  Fina looked at Kate. “Thank you,” she said.

  Kate found a laugh. “No, thank you. You came for your mysterious stranger. I came for this. We won’t fail.”

  She looked out to sea. There were orders being shouted, shots being fired, magic being flung between ships. It all seemed distant, as though it were once again happening to somebody else and she was just waiting.

  They didn’t have long to wait. Within minutes, the shout came again, and the sea began to bubble. The kraken raised itself above the ship, a gaping scaled mountain with tentacles and teeth and dark, rage-struck eyes flecked with green.

  Fina had never been able to enter an animal’s mind. She had tried several times—on horses in battle, on birds in flight. Her magic had touched the very edges of their gray-white consciousness but never slipped past the threshold. For whatever reason, their souls weren’t for her.

  But a kraken was no mere animal. The stranger had been able to sense its presence in his territory even though it was at the bottom of an ice-cold ocean—some wild magic in its mind and blood must be open to him.

  It had to be open to her too. She had chased the stranger across half the world. She couldn’t lose him now because of a monster.

  It was turning in the water, tentacles breaching the surface, waves cascading like glass from its great head.

  She reached out with her magic.

  To her relief, she found it at once—not a human mind, but not an animal one either. Its nervous system reached out to envelop her, clumsy and faintly nauseating but still recognizable, like pulling on an ill-fitting coat that smelled of damp. It took her a moment to recognize the heaviness in its limbs, the faint metallic taste at the back of its throat. She had never encountered them in any body that she had entered. They had been a part of her own for many years. The kraken was spellbound.

  Her magic recoiled instinctively; at once, she was back on the deck, the thunder of cannon fire in her ears, the waves bright and cold. She shuddered. Pity and disgust rose in her throat, and she swallowed them back down with difficulty. No. No, not again. Not that.

  “What is it?” Nelson must have seen her return somehow. Perhaps her eyes had opened—they tended to close when she left her body, although there was no need.

  She took a moment to find
her voice. “They’ve given it the compound.” Her own voice barely rose over the waves. “The spellbinding compound. The one they give slaves. They must not have an animancer, or they didn’t want to rely on one. That’s why the mesmers haven’t been able to wrest control of it. It isn’t in control of its own actions anymore.”

  “Which means you won’t be either.” His voice was grim, even over the noise. “Even if you were to take it.”

  “I don’t know— No, stop!” He hadn’t moved, exactly, but she had seen the twitch as he prepared to give the order to leave. She raised her chin. “I can do it. Let me try again.”

  “If it charges this ship—”

  “I know.” She closed her eyes, bracing herself, and shut Nelson from her mind. The kraken was there. She reached again, felt the flicker of its mind, and once again the cold, metallic taste of alchemy.

  This time, she fought the instinctive scream in her head, the scream of a six-year-old in a slave ship. She pushed through it and focused on the alchemy itself.

  The stranger was working his way into her own people’s minds through the spellbinding. And she knew the alchemy as well as anyone—not the compounds and science, as the enemy had learned from Clarkson, but the feel of it. She reached for that feeling now, seeding herself in the creature’s blood along the gold-tainted tracks the French magic had left. The world went silent.

  At first she thought her eyes had opened. It was only when the rush of dizziness cleared that she realized it wasn’t her eyes that had opened at all. It was the great black eyes of the kraken, and she was behind them.

  Through the kraken’s eyes, everything was distorted, telescoped, awash with weird shades of blue gray and very far away. The ships, so many of them, were washed about on the waves like children’s toys. The Victory was a tiny, globular shape on the water; Nelson on deck was a blur of white. Her body was on that deck too, somewhere, but she had never felt more distant from it. The kraken’s mind was alien, overwhelming. She felt the power coiled in its tentacles, all muscle and sinew and slime, the weight of its great head, the thud—no, double thud—of its two massive hearts. The waves crashed about them, and the wind beat noiselessly. But worse than that, far worse, was its anguish. She felt, far beneath its skin, the rage and confusion and fear of a creature that had been free for hundreds of years and was now trapped in its own body. It had been wild and strange and part of the sea, and now it was contained by words and alchemy, as though somebody had sought to confine the ocean in a bottle. She felt its raw hurt, and what was worse, she remembered it. She felt again all the wordless fury of being a slave. It threatened to submerge her.