by H. G. Parry
“It will be difficult,” Wilberforce said, and knew he was stalling. Nevertheless, what he was saying was true. “Almost impossible. Even with the support of the king, you’ll be fighting for the support of a hopelessly deadlocked House; nobody’s been able to hold the office for more than a few months at a time recently. Fox and his people will try to destroy you—politically, mentally, even physically. Nobody your age has ever done anything like this.”
“I know,” Pitt said. “But I didn’t ask if you thought I could. I want to know, honestly, if you think I should try.”
Wilberforce considered his friend carefully. It was something he had done often in the early days of their acquaintance, when he had been trying to learn about the real person hiding beneath the proud, reserved surface Pitt was apt to present to the world. He didn’t bother so often now: after years of friendship, laughter, politics, countryside holidays, evenings at the club, and long, serious conversations that stretched across entire nights, he thought he knew that person as well as anyone. Certainly the reverse was true. Yet right now, he was struck by the sense that he was seeing something that waited even further beneath the surface. He wasn’t sure what it was, except that it was potentially extraordinary.
None of that, though, was something that could be put into easy words.
“I think you will do it,” Wilberforce said finally, and simply. “And I think, from what I know of your abilities, your character, and your principles, that you will be very well suited to it.”
He could have said more, but from the quick, self-conscious smile that flitted over his friend’s face, he knew that, spoken honestly, was all he had hoped to hear.
“Thank you,” Pitt said. He shook his head briskly and looked out the window at the forests of Fontainebleau as if surprised not to see the grimy pavements of London. “I need to get back to Westminster.”
“We’ll return with you, obviously,” Wilberforce said. “I’ll inform Eliot.”
“That’s very kind of you. I wish I could urge you to stay on and see out the end of the holiday, but the truth is, you’ll probably be needed back in London too—by me, if not by the country at large.” Pitt’s eyes had already regained their good humor. “It’s a shame they couldn’t have waited until November. This was rapidly becoming the greatest summer in living memory.”
“It still is, as far as I’m concerned. We’ll have to do it again, but with better letters of introduction.”
“Absolutely. Next time, we might be able to connect ourselves with a peddler, or a chimney sweep.”
“Or an ancient Roman,” Wilberforce said with a laugh, and left quickly to find Eliot. Both the corridor and the day outside were the same as they had been a moment ago, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that from now on everything was going to change.
The following day, Wilberforce, Pitt, and Eliot began their journey back to England. On the same morning, on the second floor of the house he shared with his siblings in Arras, Robespierre prepared to save a life.
He rose at six, as usual. As usual, he worked for two hours as the sun rose, until the barber arrived to dress and powder his hair. He dressed quietly, meticulously, as usual; he ate a very light breakfast of bread, cheese, and coffee, as usual, then returned to his room to work for another hour or so until it was time to go to the courts. He was so deep in thought that he almost forgot to say good morning to Charlotte at breakfast, and then forgot he had done so by the time he came to leave for work, but this, too, was usual. She rolled her eyes and had no idea of the anticipation tightening his nerves.
“I don’t suppose you have any idea what you want for dinner tonight?” she asked at the door. In the years since the night their mother was taken, she had grown into a strong-minded, sharp-tongued young woman. Her dark eyes had a way of constantly measuring up his everyday self against her ideal of him; finding him wanting was, paradoxically, the way she expressed her utter faith in what he could be. He understood this, and when he remembered, he did what he could to make the gap between everyday and ideal as small as possible. But today this simply wouldn’t work. It was a bright, clear morning, and he couldn’t fathom anything as far away as dinner.
“I have no idea,” he said. They both knew he would eat very little in any case. His stomach was always still in knots after the courthouse. Today it would be more so. “Honestly, Charlotte, whatever you want. I think I might be back late this evening, actually.”
The courts at Arras were beginning to fill as Robespierre made his way across the cobbled courtyard. He managed to return the greetings of the other advocates with nods and tight-lipped smiles, and to breathe. To everyone else, this was a fairly usual case of a man caught in an act of illegal magic. Nobody was surprised to see Robespierre defend him—it was exactly the kind of case he was known for. Nobody had any reason to suspect anything was about to happen, and they would not notice when it did.
Still, right until the end, he wasn’t sure he would be able to do it. It would be breaking the law—a corrupt law, but even so. He was still a child in a garden, hiding in the thorns while children screamed. He disgusted himself. Excuses and recriminations chased each other around his head until he heard the judge call his case, and then he stood and broke the law. There was really nothing else he could do.
He had practiced once or twice in the privacy of his own rooms, alone; this was the first time he had dared reach for the full force of his mesmerism in public. His own newly awakened magic flickered at his touch, gentle and pliable. A second later, his benefactor’s magic joined his, and it caught fire. The intensity of it was beyond anything he had expected. It scorched in his veins and throbbed in his heart. His breath caught; he adjusted his spectacles, certain it must be visible in his eyes. When he spoke, his voice no longer seemed his own.
“Abel Perrault is here because he attempted to use illegal telekinesis to steal a loaf of bread for his family.” He was speaking to the judge, but he felt mesmerism spill out across the entire room. “Given the evidence of illegal magic, I cannot ask you to acquit the prisoner. The law only allows for two possibilities: the Bastille, or the hangman’s noose. Of those, I hope you will consider the former. But I hope you will also consider the unfairness of the case against the prisoner—if not as an official representative of this country, then as one of her citizens, who should care about her people. And, having considered this, although I cannot ask you to acquit the prisoner, I hope that you will.”
It was nothing he wouldn’t have said already. Nobody watching could have pinpointed any difference in him. He was polite, intelligent, painfully precise. He drew facts and arguments from his mind as a biologist might draw out specimens from a box, one at a time, to be flayed open with a scalpel. His voice was still too weak and too quiet. But the room listened. He could feel it listening as he never had before.
“Think of this,” he said in the end. “Monsieur Perrault committed an act of illegal magic because he was starving. He is charged with this, and with theft. If current laws were not so unfair, the magic would not be a crime. But more to the point, if magic laws were not so unfair, there would have been no need for the theft. Monsieur Perrault’s only son is a weather-mage. If he had been allowed to use his magic, the family crops would not have failed this spring through want of rain. They would have had food to sell at the market, and still more to feed themselves. They could have bought bread. Monsieur Perrault would not be facing the hangman’s noose. And, what’s more, Monsieur Perrault’s youngest daughter, who starved to death in her crib last month, might still be alive.”
He sat down to scattered applause. The mesmerism left a rush of cold in its wake; he was trembling from the chill as well as nervous tension. He felt sick, if he were honest, and not at all like a revolutionary. Yet when he heard the verdict come back, acquitting the prisoner of all charges, he knew that he was exactly what he needed to be. The world had shifted under his words. In that moment, like the parting of a veil, he could see the France around him re
semble the one in his head: the one that was united, and equal, and free.
Jamaica
Summer 1783
There were bands of escaped slaves in the hills around Fina’s plantation. When Fina had first heard the overseers grumble about them, a few months after her arrival, she had thought it was impossible. She and everyone she knew were forced to take the bitter gold alchemical compound twice a day, morning and evening; her days and nights were spent screaming in her own head and never being heard. Escape was not even a dream, much less a possibility. She believed the overseers had made the brigands up to give themselves another reason to hate the slaves.
But it was true, she came to learn in snatches. There were ways to escape, though none of them were for her. Many other plantations weren’t quite as paranoid as hers: the slaves there were given the compound only in the morning, to save costs, so by night they were free to move and talk. Some slaves were left unbound altogether. Some were even freed on purpose by their owners as a reward for service, and of those some might choose the life of a brigand in the woods instead of a so-called respectable one among their former captors.
Many more, though, had been freed by the brigands themselves. They came and raided the plantations, at night or in the middle of the day, when the slaves were dispersed across the fields. They burned crops and buildings, disrupted the sugar production, and—most important of all—took away as many of the enslaved as they could. In the woods, the brigands held the rescued men and women down while their bodies fought to return to captivity, until the spell had passed from them and they were free. The chance of one of their raids was one of the great hopes of the slaves’ lives.
Fina hoped for them too, but that hope scared her. When she had first been put to work as a child, she had spent her days struggling to move of her own volition. Any movement, anytime at all. It could have been an eyeblink, a twitch of a finger, and it would have been worth months of silent struggle. It never happened. After a year, it had broken her. She stopped fighting; or, rather, her fight turned inward. The energies that had once gone into trying to move were desperately channeled into trying not to think. Many of her early memories had already failed; she willed the rest away. She let her limbs move on command and tried to drift away inside her own head. She tried to become what they pretended to think her, not for their benefit but for hers. At seven, she thought she could cease to be. What hurt most of all was the fact that if she succeeded, nobody would ever be able to tell the difference.
She didn’t succeed, of course. As she grew older, she stopped wanting to. In the darkest hours before dawn, when the alchemy was at its lowest ebb, many of the enslaved men and women around her were free enough to whisper to her in the dark, consoling her and urging her not to give in. She didn’t know how they knew what was happening to her inside her head when she couldn’t speak herself, and at first she refused to listen. But gradually her thoughts had opened to them, as though a wall had been chipped away one pebble at a time. Even though her resistance was never strong enough to whisper back, she learned to hold on to herself: to count the strokes of her machete; to try to remember the words to the songs the others sang at night; to focus on the changing seasons. She found a place that was neither her early hope nor her later despair, and she was too afraid of either to venture outside it. This was her life now. Whether from the spellbinding or from her own early efforts, she could barely remember the time before the ship had swallowed her up. She couldn’t remember her old name, or her brother’s. Wishing for freedom felt like wishing for childhood to return.
When she was twenty-seven, one of the bands attacked her plantation.
She was out in the fields on that day, laboring to cut the sugarcane that would be collected and taken to the processing plant. The sun was hot overhead, and she was sticky with sweat and throbbing with fatigue. The machete she held was heavy in her hands, and its handle rubbed the blisters between her thumb and forefinger. The overseers called out the commands as they walked their sections of the field. Their voices resonated in her ears when they were close enough, but always over the light mesmeric field that the spell in her blood picked up and obeyed.
“Swing, cut! Swing, cut! Swing, cut!”
A shout cut through the air then: not the overseers’ orders, but a high, wild cry. Even through the spellbinding, it raised the hairs on the back of her neck. The overseers’ commands cut off abruptly. She kept cutting—the orders didn’t need to be continuous to need obeying—but she felt the hold on her lessen. The tang of smoke was in the air.
“Stop still!” her own overseer barked belatedly, and her muscles locked tight. Her gaze was fixed to the ground. Yet the cries were growing louder and multiplying; the ground reverberated with footsteps as the overseers from different sections rushed past.
“It’s one of those bloody slave armies,” she heard one of them tell another.
Fina’s heart began to beat faster. Like the others, she stayed as she had halted, with her machete poised for the next swing, and yet the overseer was gone. The heat of the sun was on her back. Rifle fire and shouts drifted across the field; there must be a battle raging in the distance. For the first time in a long while, her nerves ached with the longing to straighten, just to see what was happening. Who was winning? Were the overseers chasing off the bandits, or was there some chance that one of them might make it to her? She was small, light, and easy to carry. If they saw her there, they might snatch her, even though she’d be less use as a fighter than some of the others. If she could just—
And then she stood up. It happened almost before she was aware of it: suddenly, inexplicably, she was no longer looking at the tight-packed earth and vegetation at her feet, but out across the sugarcane field that she and her fellow slaves were harvesting. The field seemed to go on forever, rows of towering yellow-green plants under a pale, cloudless sky, and human figures were dotted about it like milestones.
Part of it, close to the edges, was on fire. The smoke thickened the air; she tasted the grit of it on her tongue, although it was not close enough to catch in her throat. It was no ordinary flame: it roared and danced unnaturally, rushing in furrows toward the overseers while leaving great swaths of sugarcane untouched. Fire magic.
The overseers were running toward the smoke, pointing their pistols and muskets and stopping every now and then to fire. Other men, black men who looked strong and fierce, fired back. One of the overseers—Harry, who always cracked the whip too hard—fell clutching his arm, and Fina’s blood thrilled.
Not all of the band were returning fire. Others ran back for the hills while the gunfire covered their retreat; they ran in pairs, and each pair carried a slave between them. She could tell they were slaves by the way the bodies hung, rigid, between them: one bandit held the shoulders, arms looped under the armpits, and one took up the feet. The escape was swift, practiced, perfect. She imagined them rehearsing the hold in the evenings, in the camps beneath the trees. They would be clustered around the light of a fire, maybe, bold and cheerful, laughing as one stumbled or dropped another. She felt a sudden longing for that life. In that moment, she felt no fear at all.
Take me with you, she pleaded in her head, although there was no way they could reach her, even if they had been able to hear her. All the hope and defiance she’d ever suppressed rose to the surface. Please. I’m right here; I can see you. See me standing, and come back for me.
But they were already going, the last of the fighters retreating behind the carriers into the trees. Slaves ran to smother the fire; obviously, the overseers were giving orders once more. The last of the band disappeared. She nearly sobbed with frustration.
She heard the crack of a whip and remembered suddenly where she was. At once, she lowered her head and bent back over her work. The ground at her feet once more filled her entire vision. No more sky, no more flames, no more fighting. It was over.
“Swing, cut,” came the call, layered with mesmerism, and without her will her aching muscles
took up the machete and swung at the sugarcane.
“Bastards,” she heard a rough voice say, sounding out of breath, and realized that two of the overseers were very close. “There are more of them every year, you know. We need more soldiers here. Follow them back to their hideout and finish them off.”
“They’d never get them in those hills,” the other scoffed. “They know them like the back of their ugly hands. Plus more than half of them are magicians.”
One of the great benefits of spellbinding to the plantation owners was that it dulled a slave’s magic to nothing. One of the great dangers of escaped slaves was that their magic returned with the use of their limbs, and when it did, they tended to use it.
“That fire there—that was a fire-mage’s doing,” the first overseer said. “And they say the leader’s a mesmer.”
“They’ll never amount to anything. A few slaves and some crops—the master won’t be happy, but it’s not worth a war.”
She still listened to them, but without much interest. Now that the crush of disappointment was settling, something else was sinking in.
She’d straightened on her own. For the first time in three years, her limbs had moved and drawn themselves up of her own accord, obeying some impulse of her will that she had sent them without ever thinking it could be received. She tried again, but the spell once more held her tightly; her body continued its work swinging its machete back and forth. Whatever had happened, it had already passed. It had only been for a moment.
It had only been for a moment. But for that moment, she’d been free.
London
December 1785
It was one o’clock in the morning, and Pitt was speaking in the House of Commoners. This was far from an unfamiliar sight, despite the best efforts of the opposition to make it one. It was a special occasion only to Pitt, because the bill that he was introducing happened to be one that he and Wilberforce had been thinking over for a very long time—since, in fact, he had defended John Terrell on charges of illegal magic and found the case complicated by the issue of self-defense. Commoner magicians were allowed to use magic to defend themselves, the law determined, but not to defend others. As a lawyer, he had managed to circumnavigate the issue. Now, as prime minister, he was determined to knock it down.