by H. G. Parry
“They made a point, certainly,” Macaulay said. “They’re telling us that we’re never going to succeed. Clarkson was right: we can’t take much more of this.”
Wilberforce felt he should probably disagree with this, but he couldn’t find it in his heart to do so.
Saint-Domingue
Spring 1792
Fina walked to the insurgents’ camp at the Galliflet plantation down a dusty road staked every few feet with the bodies of black men and women. Perhaps some of them had been killed in battle; many, though, were slaves the plantation owners had butchered and left as hideous milestones to warn the rebel armies that they were without mercy.
On the day Fina arrived at the camp, it was ringed with bodies hung from hooks. Many of them were white slave owners; others were black men who had been reluctant to join the revolution. The camp commander, Jeannot Bullet, had tortured them to death and drunk the blood that spilled from their throats. His excesses had disgusted even the most furious of his supporters. A more senior commander, Jean-François Papillon, came to the camp that afternoon and put an end to it. Jeannot screamed and begged for his life before he was shot.
Saint-Domingue had become an island of corpses, and it was tearing itself to pieces.
By that time, Fina was beyond being shocked by cruelty on either side. She was beyond much of anything. She had walked through fire and gunshots and screams; her feet were skinned and bloody, and her limbs were weak with starvation. A piece of falling roof had seared her right forearm at Port-au-Prince as she had flung it up to protect her face; she had barely noticed at first, but by the time she had made it to the north her entire arm burned, and the wound stood out black under her torn sleeve. She walked past the carnage without a murmur, and kept walking. The world around her was a fever dream.
When the guards came, they came like something out of a nightmare.
There was almost no warning. Fina had time to hear a shout, and then fingers locked about her burned arm and wrenched her around. The pain cut through to the bone. Inside, she screamed, but years of showing nothing locked her face still while her vision went white and her heartbeat roared in her ears. Men’s faces swam in front of her eyes, shouting in harsh, guttural creole she couldn’t understand. They spoke a different language here, one that mingled French rather than English with the African dialects she knew. She stumbled, and the strong fingers yanked her to her feet.
“Who are you?” she heard. The rest was lost in confusion. She fought to answer, but her jaw wouldn’t move. It was as though she was under a spell once more. Everything was pain and fear. Her magic twisted in her chest, useless; even if she were to escape her body, there was nothing she could do to save herself. She wondered if this was how she would die, and felt nothing at all, not even relief.
A woman’s voice had joined the confusion now, high and angry, as if scolding. It made no sense.
She didn’t want to die.
A pair of hands seized her shoulders, and then her feet left the ground. Her head fell back, and all she could see was the pale, dazzling blue of the sky.
Much later, she learned that the men had been demanding to know if she had been sent to the camp to spy on them, and that the woman, Celeste, had saved her life. The glint of green in Fina’s eyes, which had yet to wear away even though it had been weeks since she had taken any of the spellbinding compound, had told Celeste that she was an escaped slave seeking help. She had screamed at the men to let Fina go; her voice had alerted one of the camp leaders, who had come and taken her under his protection. He was a slight, wiry man, with grizzled hair and a weathered face, but when he spoke sharply to the men, they stepped down.
All Fina knew was the dull glare of the sun outside dimming into the coolness of a hut, and gentle fingers stroking her head while another set of hands ripped her sleeve from her arm. She wriggled away on reflex, but a woman’s voice spoke to her soothingly. A warm gel was smoothed over her arm; she was weak enough and tired enough to flinch at the sting.
“It’s all right.” A man’s voice. She could still barely follow the lilting, rapid-fire creole, but this voice was gentler and deeper than the others. “It will hurt at first, I know, but this will help. What’s your name?”
She had to swallow three times before she found her voice, and it was barely a whisper. But the world was settling back into place. A hurricane had swept her up and put her down somewhere new, but her feet were back on the ground.
“Fina,” she said. She had a surname—it was the name of the family who owned her plantation. But she would never say it again.
“Did you escape from a plantation in the south to join us? You wouldn’t be the first. There’s a place for you here, if you want it.”
“Thank you.” In her exhaustion, she wasn’t sure if she said it in his language or her own until his hands faltered on her arm.
“You’re not from the south, are you?” he said. “Where did you come from?”
She considered lying. But what did it matter? These people wouldn’t return her to her plantation, even if they could—and they couldn’t.
“Jamaica.” She managed to look the man directly in the eyes, though his face was blurred. “I came from Jamaica.”
His face was puzzled, and he opened his mouth to speak. Then a sharp call came from across the camp; his head whipped toward it, and when he looked back, his eyes were distracted.
“Keep the dressing on your arm,” he said. “Have something to drink, and rest. Celeste will look after you. Find me if it gets any worse.”
She nodded, and he was gone.
Celeste was a sturdy, matter-of-fact woman, about Fina’s age but with an easy self-possession that made her seem older. She had come from a plantation where only those with magic had been spellbound, and so the mere act of moving and speaking wasn’t the novelty to her that it was to others. Her fifteen-year-old son had been sold into the south a year ago, before the uprising: she had no idea if he was alive, or if, like his father, he had died at his work. She hated the plantation owners, and she was as determined to liberate the island as anyone. But she was also a fierce pragmatist, and she didn’t hold with violence against other former slaves. She explained this to Fina as she gave her water in a bowl and tucked a thin blanket over her.
“It’s been just as bad up here as it’s been in the south, where you’ve walked through,” she said. “The plantations are all burned, so there was no food—we’d have all starved last month without the Spanish sending supplies. They want to help us—they think this is their chance to move in and take this half of the island from the French. But we’ll get through. There’s no need to turn on our own.”
Fina was half-asleep, and the words drifted over and around her like the tide. She forced herself awake, though, to ask, “Who was that man here before? The one who stopped them shouting?”
“That was Toussaint Bréda,” Celeste said. “You were lucky he was here. He’s kind to prisoners—he’s even kind to slave owners.”
“Is he the leader?”
Celeste shrugged. “Depends who you talk to. He isn’t supposed to be—he’s under Biassou’s command. Biassou and Jean-François both outrank him. Bullet did too, before they killed him this morning. But Toussaint—there’s something about him. His eyes look right at you.” She leaned closer, conspiratorial. “He was at the ceremony.”
She didn’t know the word, but she repeated it carefully without admitting this. “What ceremony?”
“The voodoo ceremony. The night before the rebellion, Boukman called on the loa to give us the strength to break free. Toussaint was one of those there.”
“Does he believe in voodoo?” She had already learned that many of the black population in Saint-Domingue worshipped the spirits of their homeland, while others remained faithful to the Catholicism pressed on them by the white masters. Some worshipped both, without troubling themselves about the contradictions.
Celeste snorted. “Him? No. He thinks it’s all superstit
ion. But he was there. Perhaps it believes in him. Now go to sleep.”
Fina did sleep: the first uninterrupted sleep she had found since she had stepped off the ship and into the inferno of Port-au-Prince. When she woke, it was the early hours of the morning, and the camp was stirring. The ground was hard packed beneath her blanket, and the air smelled of smoke with the faintest memory of hibiscus and oleander. Fina closed her eyes again, deliberately this time, and reached out with her magic.
She reached out with her magic a great deal over the next few days. She’d had a practice, over her long weeks on the road, of hiding and using others’ eyes to look at the road ahead, to keep herself safe, and to avoid any confrontations. Now she used it more deeply, to learn the place she had come to and the people she had come among. Her magic couldn’t give her people’s voices, but she had learned to read the things their eyes picked up, the corresponding flutters of emotion, and even rare glimpses of their memories. She learned, for example, that Celeste’s eyes were sharp to pick up on children and the weaker members of the camp so she could help them as she had Fina, but that she also stopped to gaze at sunsets and her heart would uncurl within her when she did. She watched, with her own eyes and with those of other people, as the ill-provisioned guerrilla fighters came back from the borders of the camp streaked with filth, laughing too hard. She watched the supplies dwindle, and the men sicken. She watched, and tried to understand the shifts in power that were taking place.
Most of all, she watched Toussaint Bréda.
She wasn’t sure what had drawn her to him at first, other than the fact that he had helped her. But it quickly became apparent, as she moved about the camp, that he was indeed special. He was older than many of the others, for one thing: in his midforties, yet still exuding wiry strength. He was born a slave, yet when the revolts broke out, he had been free and prosperous, with slaves of his own who were now part of the rebellion. More important, he was quiet, stern, implacable. When others raged, he listened, much as Fina did herself, and his eyes were like steel.
And he had been there at the start of the rebellion. He had planned the night the voice had spoken to his people and urged them to rise up. Perhaps he was one of the few trustworthy people who could tell her what she wanted to know. The trouble was, she couldn’t decide to trust him.
Instead, she watched him as he rode into camp with the dark, tireless after days without sleep. She listened, as much as she could, as he talked to his men in rapid creole. She reached out to him with her magic as he worked to make medicines to treat the sick. From behind Toussaint’s eyes, she saw the details of the aloe plant he was cutting, in startling precision. She felt the fleshy leaves in his hands yield a clear gel to heal the skin; she felt his awareness of the rest of the camp, even though he sat with his back to them all. She felt his purpose, as clear as hers had been the night she left the plantation, yet gentler, firmer, less at the mercy of anger and fear. And yet none of this meant anything solid; she couldn’t tell how best to approach him, or if it would be safe to do so. She had survived years of her life through constant, vigilant caution. She didn’t know how to break it.
In fact, she might never have broken it, had Toussaint not come to her first.
It had been raining all day, dangerous, unrelenting rain that lashed at the trees and turned the twisted mountain paths into trickles of mud. Celeste and her friend Anne had risked the weather to share the food; Fina had remained behind, preferring to make a bargain with hunger for relative warmth and the solitude of the empty tent. She could survive, she had found over the last few months, on very little food, and she didn’t want to be seen to take too much. Despite the help of the Spanish troops, supplies were becoming scarce again. She didn’t know how long she’d be able to stay if they ran much lower.
Her companions had already been gone longer than she expected when she heard the rustle of the flap and felt the sting of wind. She looked up, expecting to see them.
“May I come in?” Toussaint asked.
Fina watched warily as he closed the tent flap behind him. He was very small, was her first thought—smaller than he had seemed from a distance, and even from inside his head. His limbs were thin under his blue coat, and his eyes were on a level with her own. His face was wizened and asymmetrical, and his curly hair was shot through with gray. It was a strong, likable face, but difficult to read—a face that invited respect rather than friendship.
“I’m the chief medic,” he said, which almost made her smile. Even had she not been hearing his name whispered about the region, she would have known he was more than that. But titles meant little here. The rebels borrowed rank and uniforms from the whites with flamboyant abandon: Biassou had styled himself a brigadier. “We met the day you arrived.”
“I know.” It look her a while to find the foreign words—she was too focused on watching him, wondering what he would do. Her heart beat quickly, from anticipation rather than fear. “You’re Toussaint.”
“I am. How’s your arm?”
“It’s fine.” She resisted the urge to glance down at it and kept her eyes fixed on him. “It hurts less.”
“Good.” He paused. “Your friends tell me that you escaped from your plantation and came to us from Jamaica.”
She nodded. She could have said more, but long habit kept her silent. It was different for the others at the camp: they had been enslaved, but they had never had to pretend to be otherwise. As soon as the spell was broken, they had been able to move, talk, scream. Even now, too many years had been spent trying not to show a flicker of an eyelash out of place for her to relax her guard.
Toussaint didn’t seem to expect her to speak. He sat down on the ground opposite her, avoiding the steady column of rain pouring through a gap in the tent roof. His eyes watched her, dark and steady, without a trace of the spell-green glints that still lingered in her own eyes.
“You’ve awoken to your magic,” he said. It took her a moment to realize that he had spoken in her old language—her childhood language, the one she and Molly had shared. Had she still been pretending to be spellbound, she would have been lost then. Her breath caught.
He smiled, unsurprised. “You spoke the language on the day we met. But even if you hadn’t, I might have wondered. There’s a look about you that made me think of my father. He was the second son of an Aradan king. You were born free?”
She had to swallow hard before she could speak. The familiar lilt woke an ache in her chest, unbearably sweet and sad at the same time. “Yes.”
“I wondered that too. Magic tends to emerge faster in those who weren’t spellbound from birth—though it’s really only a matter of time, and degree. Many are awakening to their magic on this island these days, including those who never suspected it.”
She avoided the implied question. “Did you awaken to magic when you were freed?”
“I was never spellbound, even when I was a slave.” His answer came readily—so readily, in fact, that she suspected he had determined from the start to be open with her. “The family that owned us were kind, as far as that went. They let me grow up without magic restricting me, as long as I did my work—they even allowed me to be educated, as a free child might have been.”
“Celeste says you protected the family from the rebellion.”
“I did. You don’t think I should have?”
“I don’t know.” She only knew she would never have thought to do it for the family who owned her plantation. “I don’t know them.”
He nodded as if satisfied. “To answer your first question, I have very little magic of my own—a little weather magic, that’s all: enough to call a breeze, or a sunbeam. No healing magic. What I do as a doctor, I do by knowledge alone—from reading, and from what my parents taught me. But you… for you to fight the spellbinding as you did, your magic must be very strong.”
There was, she supposed, no real reason for it to be a secret any longer. And of all the people she could tell, from all the watching she had
done, he was the best. Still, it was difficult to speak it out loud. She had never even done so to Molly.
“I can see through others’ eyes,” she said. “Sometimes I can feel what they feel. I can’t do anything useful, just see.”
To his credit, he didn’t react beyond a slight twitch of an eyebrow. “I’ve never heard of a magic like that. It sounds like a very beautiful gift.”
“It does?”
“I think so. I would think it would be a privilege to be able to see through someone else’s eyes. To have some sense of how they see the world. Isn’t it?”
“It could be,” she conceded. “But most of what there is to see is very ugly at the moment.”
“It might not always be. Why have you come here?”
“To the camp?”
“To Saint-Domingue.”
She hesitated. “I want to free my people. The men and women I grew up with. When I heard about the rebellion here, I came.”
“There are insurrectionists on Jamaica as well,” Toussaint said. “They haven’t yet achieved the uprising that we have, but they may. If you wanted to free your people, then it would have been far simpler and less dangerous for you to escape and join them. Why did you come to us?”
“Because you’ve succeeded where they’ve failed. And because—”
She couldn’t quite bring herself to go further, even though she had steeled herself to do it. She hovered on the brink, afraid to jump.
“What is it?” he asked. “I might be able to help you, you know.”
“I don’t know if I can trust you.” She shook her head, frustrated, as much with herself as with him. “I don’t know who you are.”
He considered that carefully; she could see it turning over behind his eyes. At last, he looked up, having come to a decision of his own. “Why don’t you look? You have magic that allows you to see people through their own eyes. Look.”