A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  Fina didn’t wait to hear anything more, and she didn’t trouble herself to answer. She closed her eyes. Around her, the wind began to rise, and rain fell in hard drops from the sky.

  Her magic found the dragon at once. It wasn’t like the kraken, or like any other living soul she had encountered. Her magic rushed to its mind, like a sliver of steel to a powerful magnet or a pebble dropped into a stream. She didn’t catch hold of it; she was swept away by it.

  She was flying. It was like nothing she had ever felt before. The joy of it overwhelmed the terror; for a moment, everything was starry sky and sea and clear horizons, and it was the most free she had ever been. The growing wind buffeted the leathery wings and its muscles throbbed with exertion, but even the ache was sweet, like a languorous stretch after a long sleep.

  The sight of the ship through the gold-tinged eyes brought back her focus; as the dragon plummeted toward it, she concentrated on its mind rather than its body. It was very different from the head of the kraken. That had been a web of instinct and magic, wild and strange as the sea itself. The dragon’s mind was strange too, but it blazed along paths of intellect and strategy. It understood war and bloodshed. Its desires were guided by another’s, it was true, but it was a willing symbiosis. The pact it had made with the stranger or with Bonaparte was not the forced enslavement of the kraken.

  There was no point in reaching for control, Fina saw at once. She made one attempt to do so, but it was like trying to stop a hurricane by grasping hold and pulling. It was far stronger than her or any other magician. She watched helpless through its eyes as the Victory came closer, and she felt the swell of flame in its chest. It could be her death she was feeling, but at the same time she couldn’t help but glory in the sinewy curve of its neck as it drew back, the soundless roar as fire poured through open jaws and engulfed the ship.

  The flame didn’t touch the wood. On the deck, Kate must have made a frantic surge of effort, because lightning split the skies and a gust of rain-specked wind billowed under the wings of the dragon. It barely shifted the massive bulk, but its neck arched in surprise or annoyance, and the flame went wide. It glanced off the port side of the ship; the charm designed to ward off flame held, barely. The ship shimmered green as the fire licked about its hull. Stray fires broke out on the deck and one of the masts; Coulby, the water-mage, rushed to douse them. It wouldn’t survive another pass. The dragon wheeled in the sky.

  No point in reaching for control. Instead, she reached deeper, to the layer of thoughts and memories. They were fragmented and discordant; she recognized very little except flame and darkness and, just once, the face of Napoléon Bonaparte.

  Come with me, he had said. I will give you entire armies to devour.

  Her eyes flew open. At once, the storm that was a faint tickle to the dragon engulfed her—she gasped with the shock of cold as she found herself soaking wet and shivering. Hester stood beside her, white-faced and tense. The sea steamed around them, and smoke filled the air. Ash fell from the mast.

  “God, did you see that?” Hester raised her voice over the shouts of the crew. “It passed right over us. If it comes back—”

  “He’s made a mistake,” Fina said. She felt a laugh well up behind her words, fragile and precarious, but didn’t let it loose. It was all still too uncertain. “The stranger. The dragon let itself be bound in Egypt because it sensed his magic, but he wasn’t there in person. It didn’t give allegiance to him—it gave it to Napoléon.”

  “So Bonaparte holds the dragon? Not the stranger?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, what does that matter? He’s still trying to kill us.”

  “But Napoléon isn’t a blood magician. The dragon isn’t happy being bound by him—it feels it’s been tricked. It wants to be freed. I think it could be turned by a stronger magician.”

  Hester’s eyes kindled. “Can you speak to it?”

  “Not me,” she said. “But I think you can.”

  “Me?” Hester shook her head. “Believe me, I am not given to modesty, false or otherwise, but I don’t have anything like your magic. I can mesmerize, to an extent, but—”

  “From my understanding, that’s all that Bonaparte can do. All it needed was to sense the touch of the stranger’s magic, and it was enough.”

  “He was a true blood magician.” It was the most uncertain Fina had ever heard her. “I am many things, but I am not that.”

  Fina growled in frustration. “I thought you of all people would know better than to think of magic as if it comes in boxes. You have enough blood magic in your veins that the stranger noticed you at Trafalgar, and you noticed him. The dragon might as well.”

  “The stranger didn’t care about me at Trafalgar. He only cared about you. I don’t see why the dragon would.”

  “The stranger didn’t see me at first either! If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the stranger doesn’t always see everybody he should. He sees women and slaves and Commoners when he ought to see magicians.”

  Hester’s chin rose at that, as Fina had hoped it would. “Very well,” she said. “Let’s show him.”

  Before Fina could move, Hester was on the rigging. One of the sailors made a move to stop her but abandoned the attempt in mid-grasp—his attention, like that of the rest of the crew, was on the dragon. Rifles cracked uselessly as it bore down on the ship. She climbed higher, until Fina almost lost sight of her: a tiny dark-haired figure against the encroaching shadow.

  “Kate,” Fina called to the weather-mage belatedly. “Kate, try to keep the wind away from the rigging.”

  Kate didn’t answer, absorbed entirely in the storm around her, but Fina thought the wind grew a little less vicious after that. At least, the ropes seemed to snap and pull against the masts less roughly.

  The dragon was above them when Hester stopped climbing and turned to face it. Its neck had pulled back, and Fina saw the glow of fire in its chest. Hester’s voice was almost snatched away by the wind from its wings. But Fina heard her.

  “Here I am!” she called. It was defiance and declaration and joy at once. It didn’t matter that the words were barely audible; it didn’t matter that the dragon had no language to understand them. It was the call with which Camille Desmoulins had set a revolution on fire and with which Toussaint Louverture had summoned a storm: the call of magic wild and free. Her eyes blazed with it. “Come to me.”

  The dragon roared. Fina had just enough time to feel the full force of doubt and to reject it. As Toussaint had told her years ago, outside of Europe there was only magic, and what it could do, and what it couldn’t. Hester was the daughter of a line of blood magicians, one of the strongest-willed people Fina had ever met, and she could speak to a dragon.

  The fire died in the dragon’s chest; the crew of the Victory saw it burn into embers and disappear. It had been in mid-dive; at the last moment, it twisted and swept in an arc over the ship. It hovered in midair, level with where Hester clung to the rigging. It was listening.

  Come with me, Napoléon had said. I will give you entire armies to devour.

  “I’m here,” Hester said now. “What do you want?”

  Fina closed her eyes again.

  The dragon was even easier to find this time. But it was no longer alone. Hester’s mesmerism burned in its mind, playful and flickering and utterly self-assured. It was the second time Fina had felt mesmerism in someone’s thoughts, after their experiment with Clarkson. The dragon’s response was different, though. The dragon caught the mesmerism with fire of its own, and entwined with it.

  Hester had told Fina the day they met that she had never felt fear. She felt it now, and the dragon felt it with her. It recognized all the fierce and wild and dangerous parts of her, and it shared them. It felt fear of its own, and grief. It had been promised armies to devour, as it had once before, but the world was different now and more complicated. Bonaparte didn’t understand dragons or magic, not really, and the blood magic it had sensed did not belo
ng to him. The dragon was a creature of another time, of sand and stone and conquest, and it had no place in the new age.

  “What do you want?” Hester asked it again.

  The answer came in a surge like flame. Pale sky, scorching sun, and cool dark under the earth, endless flickering dreams that were real enough to taste. It was overwhelming, the feel of another creature’s life perfectly understood.

  Fina felt all this with them. And so she was not surprised at all when she heard or felt Hester gasp, “Go,” and the dragon peeled away from them like the lifting of a shadow or the turn of a page. It wheeled in the sky, achingly graceful; the ship rocked in the wind from its wings, but it skimmed inches from contact. It rose higher, into the starlight, and then it was gone.

  A cry went up from the ship; Fina, opening her eyes, caught the tail end of it. It was a collective sob of wonder and relief, and also of disbelief. Kate’s good hand dropped to her side, and so did the wind; without it, she swayed and sank to her knees. Nobody seemed quite sure of what had happened.

  Hester was making her way down from the rigging, shakily. Fina stepped forward in time to help her with the last few rungs.

  “I sent it home,” Hester said. She was trembling, half laughing, and there were tears on her face. “Back to Egypt, under the sands. It wanted to go. It didn’t want to fight anymore. I know I should have tried to bind it myself, for the war, but I couldn’t. I don’t mean it was too strong; it just… I couldn’t.”

  “I know,” Fina said. She held her tightly. “Of course you couldn’t. I felt it too.”

  Something terribly important had happened, she thought. Some great and wondrous step toward magic that didn’t control, didn’t restrict or confine or destroy or even burn the world on its way to freedom, but liberated. It was far too soon to know exactly what it was, or whether it would mean anything. But she kept it for later.

  “God, don’t tell my uncle,” Hester was saying. “He’ll be furious. Well, perhaps not furious—I think you have to personally spend the entire national budget on hats or something to get him furious—but certainly disappointed. England could have had a battle dragon.”

  The reminder pulled her back to the present threat. “France did have a battle dragon,” she said. “For how long? What have we missed out there?”

  “It can’t have been for long. They knew nothing of it at Gibraltar. And Bonaparte won’t be able to touch it now—unless he goes back to Egypt, and he can’t, can he? That country slipped from his grasp a long time ago. Besides, it wouldn’t go with him. It knows him now.”

  Fina said nothing. She wasn’t at all certain that the stranger wouldn’t find a way to reclaim the dragon, even if Bonaparte could not, but that was a difficulty for another time. Something was happening tonight, possibly even as they stood there on the deck. She didn’t know what it was, but it had to be important.

  “There’s only one reason that dragon would be sent to keep us from reaching England,” Hester said. She had regained her composure now, and her thoughts were on the same path. “This ship doesn’t matter. Nelson’s corpse doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. You matter. The enemy is afraid of you.”

  It was true. It had taken a long time for the stranger to learn to be afraid of her, but he was now. He feared her because she had found him in Jamaica, and because she had found him in the head of Bonaparte. He had feared her at Trafalgar because she could find him again—and she had, and the invasion had been stopped even though he had escaped her.

  Bonaparte had sent that dragon, not the stranger. From what she had gleaned of the dragon’s thoughts, Bonaparte had set himself against the stranger now. But it wouldn’t have surprised her one bit if he was still doing what the stranger wanted in some small ways—if the stranger, knowing his connection with Bonaparte was limited now, had pushed all his influence into forcing Napoléon to, unknowingly, send the dragon after her.

  Which meant that wherever the stranger was now, he was afraid of being found by her again.

  “He was trying to keep you from reaching England,” Hester said hesitantly. “Do you think he’s there? Now? Tonight?”

  “I need to find him,” Fina said.

  Hester frowned. “The stranger? I thought you couldn’t.”

  “So did I,” Fina said. “But the enemy clearly thinks differently, and perhaps just this once I’m the one underestimating myself. I have to try.”

  Run, Toussaint had said to her, before the darkness had swallowed him up. And then turn, and make a stand.

  She had run across the entire world—first to escape her enemy and then to find him. She had turned. He had run from her. Now, at last, it was time to stand.

  Walmer Castle / At Sea

  January 1806

  It had been a long time since Wilberforce had been to Walmer Castle. He thought he hadn’t returned since Fina’s arrival; Pitt hadn’t been there in some months either. It was strange to be approaching it after midnight, with the moon glittering on the ocean in a long ribbon beside them; it was even stranger to see it deserted, without so much as a flag or a tent on the stony beach to indicate that an army had ever camped there. Without lights burning in the windows the castle looked eerily like a relic from the past.

  “Stop here, please,” Pitt called out to the driver, just before they turned into the entrance. He turned to Wilberforce. “I think we’d better walk in alone.”

  They got out onto the spongy grass and sent the driver back to the nearest village. From the speed at which he departed, he needed no persuasion to obey. Clearly he felt something uncanny about the place, or simply the fact that he had been asked to ferry his employer and the prime minister to it under terms of the utmost secrecy.

  As the carriage rattled away, Pitt took a deep breath of the sea air and released it again. “Much better. I shouldn’t have left this place to start with.”

  “You can’t tell me you’re glad to be home, under the circumstances.”

  “After all day in that carriage, I’m glad to be anywhere. Besides, I haven’t seen it in a long time.”

  “The trees are growing well,” Wilberforce said. He didn’t say it to be flippant or seem unconcerned. He had just seen the rows of pale oaks lining the front of the castle, and they struck him as particularly lovely beneath the stars.

  Pitt smiled very slightly. “Yes,” he said. “They are, aren’t they?”

  Wilberforce hesitated. “Can you… I mean, is the enemy…?”

  “Yes. Yes, he’s here.”

  “Oh.” Wilberforce swallowed and tried to look as though he were not scared to death.

  Pitt did not look scared to death. Hours ago he had looked near death itself, but his friend had always been able to divorce his mind from his body when the situation required it, and now he was as tall and straight and purposeful as he had been twenty-two years ago when he had been proclaimed the leader of the government of Great Britain. Only his pallor and emaciation betrayed him.

  Wilberforce wondered, briefly, how he looked. Tiny, probably, and bedraggled, and shortsighted and anxious. He had hoped that in the face of danger, he would find himself gaining new strength. Maybe he would when the time came, but right now his old nameless fear of shadows had surfaced, and he was cold with it.

  The enemy wasn’t a shadow, he reminded himself, which was pointless. It was worse.

  “Where do you think he is?” he said.

  “Inside somewhere. He knows we’re here by now, I have no doubt, so he will have chosen the battleground.” Pitt handed him one of the two pistols. Wilberforce took it gingerly, as though it might bite. “Don’t worry. We’ll find him. He will want to be found.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about,” Wilberforce muttered, inspecting the pistol. “I don’t want to find him.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “No,” Wilberforce conceded. “I don’t.” He took a deep breath and managed a small smile for his friend. “Shall we look for him, then?”

  “We might
as well,” Pitt said, with a much-needed smile of his own. “I don’t have anything else planned for tonight.”

  The moon was shining on the drawbridge as they crossed, and Wilberforce would rather have done anything else in the world but go inside. But Pitt went in unflinching, and so he followed.

  The enemy was waiting for them.

  The castle itself, when they entered, was empty; the darkness was undisturbed in the repainted corridors and remodeled rooms. The cannons on the battlements stood alone overlooking the coast. It wasn’t until later, after they descended the curved stone stairs, that they saw the outer door open leading to the cellars and knew they had found it. It was the oldest part of the castle, and the only part that Pitt hadn’t touched in some shape or form. The army used it as a storeroom and occasional barracks. It would be pitch-black but for the moonlight that slanted through the high windows.

  When they opened the door, a voice came at once from the darkness at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Unarmed, if you don’t mind.”

  It was the first time any of them had heard the enemy speak in the light of the real world, and it was the first time Wilberforce had heard him at all. It was a beautiful voice—the enunciation light and pleasant, the English without any trace of an accent. The kind of voice that would carry real weight in the House of Commoners, and make the walls sing. It chilled him. “I understand why you’ve brought those pistols. I have two myself. I assure you that I can see you better than you can see me, and that if you try to fire, I can fire first. And, among other things, that would be a disappointing end to our first real encounter. Throw them into the center of the room, please, and I’ll throw mine before you come down.”

  “Forgive us for not trusting your word,” Pitt said, “but what assurance do we have that you’ll do any such thing?”

  “We’re both blood magicians, and we’ve agreed to a challenge. That means a duel by magic, not by pistols. You, at least, can trust my word.” A note of impatience entered his tone. “Oh, come now. You didn’t come here to shoot me in the dark, as if we were brawlers on the street. You came to face me, and I to face you. Let’s face one another.”