by H. G. Parry
Fina got at once to her feet.
She expected to be led up to the battlements of Fort George, perhaps through soldiers arming themselves for war. Instead, she found herself following Toussaint down the winding cliff track that led to the sea. It was rough going, even with a clear path: twice she stumbled, and the thorn bushes that jutted out from the cliffs snagged on her skirt. The beach was deserted; now that the British troops had been pushed south, there were only fishing boats in the harbor, and none of them were crewed. The sea was silent and glittering in the dazzle of the sun.
Toussaint caught her arm as she descended the last few steps. He pointed out to sea.
“Do you see them?” he asked. “There, on the horizon.”
She looked, squinting against the glare. It took a while for the haze of waves and light to resolve into shapes, and when it did, her heart jolted.
“Yes,” she said. “I see them—who do they belong to?”
“Britain,” Toussaint said. “What we can see is only the first of the fleet. There are two hundred of them, the stranger told me.”
The shapes were white sails on the edge of the sea—sail after sail after sail. They seemed never ending. They caught the breeze, straight and tall and proud. She remembered the first time she had ever seen a ship, when she was five, and had thought it was a hollow monster come to devour her. She hadn’t been wrong.
“Is that enough to take Saint-Domingue?” she heard herself ask.
“We’ll never find out,” he said. “They’ll never reach us.”
“Why not?”
In answer, he closed his eyes.
The wind began to stir in the trees; Fina felt it in her hair and against the cooling sweat on her skin. Overhead, the clear blue sky darkened with clouds: no small, fluffy wisps, but mountainous, rolling, the sort that heralded a hurricane. Rain prickled her upturned face. The sea, so calm and still, began to rise.
Weather magic. They had a few among them who could perform it. A woman who could raise winds strong enough to force back soldiers; a man whose rain could break the banks of a river. She had seen it once in Jamaica, from a magician called to the big house after an unusually long dry spell threatened the sugarcane fields. But he had drawn clouds only in patches. It had almost been comical, watching the small tufts delivering their light showers like water wrung from a washcloth. This stretched as far out to sea as her eyes could reach. Toussaint’s face, eyes closed, was furrowed in concentration.
The waves were rising now, higher and higher, it seemed almost to the fort itself. The ships were battered, spun around in circles. On the closest, her eyes were good enough to see the mast crack in two like a twig. The rain lashed about her body, whipping at her hair and clothes; on the horizon, the sea surged and crashed. It was triumphant: a celebration of violence and chaos, of a magic that was wild and cruel. She felt her heart respond, and she cried out. She couldn’t tell if the cry was joy or terror. Her own voice was lost in the roar.
Paris, the Hôtel de Ville
“My God,” Augustin said quietly.
Robespierre was signing his name to a document Hanriot had given him: a message to rally the loyal districts to their cause and to reassure them that liberty survived. It was very difficult to do, with the trembling of his hand and the darkness before his eyes, and it was only with great concentration that he had managed the first three neat letters. He was determined to achieve the others, if for no other reason than to show his enemies he was still alive. Yet at the sound of his brother’s voice, he broke off, almost with relief.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” Augustin said, in the tone that, when he was a small boy, would have meant that he had broken something. Robespierre joined him at the window to see what had been broken this time.
The courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville was thick with people, all bearing torches and pikes and the red caps of magicians. The cannon that had been firing throughout the evening had been swarmed and overturned; mob magic crackled in the air. The riot stretched back as far as they could see, clogging crooked streets and carpeting the ground in front of them. It was as though Paris had cracked open, and a dark, silty current spewed forth.
Robespierre watched without speaking. It didn’t feel quite real to him, or perhaps it felt too real, and too familiar. Another burst of violence, another uprising that he was watching out a window. There had certainly been enough of those. The only difference was that this time, it was coming in to find him. Behind him, he heard Hanriot swear.
“We won’t get out of here, will we?” Augustin said. “Not alive. The tide’s turned too far.”
“I don’t think we were ever meant to,” Robespierre said.
There were noises in the corridor; there had been for a long time, but they had ignored them. They had hoped it meant their aggressors were being held back. Looking at the scale of the aggression outside, they knew now it did not.
“What if I were to die?” Lebas said suddenly. They turned to look at him. “I mean it. Robespierre and Saint-Just… If I were to blow my own brains out, here—could you make me one of those things? Would that save you?”
“It might,” Saint-Just said. It was the first time he had spoken. He looked at Robespierre, a flicker of something in his cold eyes. “If there were few enough soldiers—an undead could hold them long enough for us to get away.”
“And go where?” Robespierre asked. His stomach churned. “There’s nowhere left to go.”
“Still. If there’s a chance—”
“It wouldn’t work. The victim needs to die unwillingly. Lebas would be sacrificing himself willingly.”
“You said the victim needs to die afraid. It may work. I’m sure Lebas is afraid.”
“We’re all afraid.” Augustin spoke up. His chin was set firmly. In that moment, he looked very much like their mother. “I know I am. And we have two pistols. There could be two undead.”
“No!” Robespierre snapped. “That death was meant for enemies of France. That’s what they’re saying we are, out there. They’ll kill us on the guillotine if they take us, as enemies of France. But they can’t do that to us, not without me. And I’ll die a thousand times before I’ll do it to you myself.”
“I don’t mind,” Lebas said. “I truly don’t. You’re my friends. And you—you’re Robespierre.”
“And you’re Babette’s husband. You’re the father of her child. Augustin’s my brother. I won’t do it. I’ve done so many things for this revolution, and I’ve done them without hesitation, and I’ve paid for them over and over and not regretted it. I’ve taken the ghosts, and the nightmares, and the cold. Not that. It’s too much.”
Perhaps he should have said it earlier. But he was saying it now.
The fighting in the corridor was getting louder. It was almost time.
A shadow formed in the air, a strong one, cold and clear. Saint-Just’s eyes closed as it took shape. It wouldn’t be enough to save them; the soldiers would take it almost at once. But it was the last pure use of magic Saint-Just would ever be likely to perform. It was an act of defiance and, in a very Saint-Just way, an act of faith. The revolution that was coming to kill them was still their revolution. Magic was still free. He would celebrate the Republic of Magicians even as he used it against them.
Robespierre wished he could do the same. He longed for one last, perfect act of magic—not the kind he had performed at the guillotine every day for the past year, but the kind he had performed once a long time ago, when a bird had taken flight in a childhood garden. But that magic had been tainted now, and so had the garden. He had mixed it with something evil, over and over, and now the dregs of it swirled inside him like the sediment at the bottom of a beer glass. They couldn’t be purged.
Lebas handed him the second pistol. It felt cold and unfamiliar in his hand.
“We’re with you, Maximilien,” his brother said quietly, and the others nodded, even Saint-Just. They were. But Camille no longer was, nor Danton. The
y had gone to their deaths on the scaffold, and their corpses were fighting in foreign fields. And his benefactor was with him too. It was sitting there in his head, a bloated spider in a web of its own making. He would never be free.
The door was buckling.
I regret that it has to end this way, Maximilien Robespierre. It was the third time he had ever heard the voice in his waking thoughts. Five thousand miles away, Fina heard it too. It has been an interesting acquaintance.
“Get out,” he hissed, too quiet for anyone to hear. He had told Camille to do the same, the last night they ever spoke. The memory broke what was left of his heart. He cocked his pistol. “Get out.”
The door burst open.
They said afterward that he tried to blow his head off—that he placed the mouth of a pistol under his chin and pulled the trigger. One of the arresting officers was a metalmancer and managed to spin the shot before it penetrated his brain. It smashed through his jaw in a shatter of blood, leaving the Incorruptible alive and gasping as they came to wrench him away. Robespierre’s friends, the ones who survived, always maintained that the soldiers were lying. In fact, they spoke as truthfully as they knew how. He did raise a pistol to his chin, and he did fire. They never knew what he had really been trying to blow away, and he could never tell them.
The storm might have lasted hours, or minutes. Gradually Fina became aware of the wind about her quieting, settling; at the same time, she became aware that she had been pushed to her knees by the force of the rain, and her fingers clutched the cliff walls in a death grip. She forced herself to relinquish it. Her hands were bleeding, and she was soaked and shivering. People died in storms like that.
“It’s over,” Toussaint’s voice came, ragged with exhaustion. He had fallen to his knees as well. “You can stand now.”
She drew herself to her feet, carefully. The sky was once more harsh, unforgiving blue; her clothes and hair were already beginning to dry. The horizon was clear.
“Did the ships sink?” Her own voice sounded husky to her ears.
“I hope not,” he said. “I hope the storm pushed them back to British waters; perhaps some may have shipwrecked near your old island, on Jamaica. I hope the damage done to their ships could be patched enough to let them limp to safety. I had no wish to harm them. But the effects of a storm cannot be so easily controlled. Above all, I wanted them to go away.”
Two hundred British ships. An invasion fleet.
“They might come back,” she said. “If they’re still alive.”
“If they do,” he said, “we will be waiting for them.”
“The stranger told you the British fleet was coming.”
“He did. That’s what he intended the magic for—he didn’t want them to take the island before he was away, and if possible not even after that. But I want it for more than that. If this magic is used correctly in battle, we can hold our ground against anybody. Not just the English or the Spanish. We can make our own terms with the French. And, what is more important, we can bring this island to life again. Everything that was burned and destroyed we can replant and make grow. We can be a nation.”
He drew himself upright. His face had a grayish tone, and his legs trembled underneath him. Yet he met her eyes steadily.
“The stranger will betray you,” Fina said. “Once he has what he wants from you.”
“Yes, he will. Or he’ll try. But think what we can do before that. Imagine what this place can be.”
Once again, he was asking her to see through his eyes—not with her magic this time, but with her mind. But he was asking for more than understanding this time. He was asking a question. If she told him that it wasn’t worth the danger, then he would listen. He might even act on her word. In this, at least, he trusted her completely.
Fina looked back at the sea. It was still now, and empty, but she remembered the moment it had been full of crashing magic, wild and cruel and free.
She was free. She realized it as if for the first time. It meant nothing to her yet: it was too strange and too fragile. It was a quirk of circumstances rather than something innate. She felt, if anything, that she belonged to Toussaint. He was bound himself now, to the French, and to the stranger. But it was a bondage he had accepted willingly, for his people, and if he paid for it, he would do so by his own choice. Perhaps that was part of what freedom meant too.
Saint-Domingue could be free. That, more than her own freedom, meant something; she felt it all around her, in the promise of the storm and the surrounding sea. A nation built by men and women who had once been slaves—even, though she could not be as forgiving as Toussaint, by some of those who had once enslaved them. A new world.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I can see it.”
Seventy-three MPs voted with Wilberforce against the breaking of the Concord, including Charles Fox. Two hundred forty-six voted for.
Fox stopped by Wilberforce on the way out and thumped him on the shoulder—not unsympathetically. “You’ll find you must join with us completely, before this is over,” he said.
Saint-Just’s shadow killed two men with a touch before it was shot through the heart. Saint-Just himself sat watching, quiet and calm. He was the only one who was led away clean from that fight. Augustin and Hanriot escaped through the windows and tumbled to the street. Augustin fell on a saber and a bayonet wielded by two citizens below. Hanriot lay broken in an open sewer, screaming in pain and begging to die. They were collected and manhandled into carts like sheaves of wheat. Couthon tumbled down the stairs and cut his head open. Lebas died by his own hand as the soldiers poured in.
Robespierre, for a few hours, seemed about to do the same. Half his jaw had been blown away by the pistol shot; by the time they had carried him to a small room in the Conciergerie, he had slipped into unconsciousness. He hovered there as the clock ticked on, flat on a table, on the edge between life and death. It would have been the most natural thing in the world for him to slip just a little further, and the Incorruptible would have never faced the mobs outside baying for his blood. Instead, he pulled himself the other way. His eyelashes flickered, then parted. His glasses had been lost somewhere in the scuffle. Without them, his eyes were the palest green, and their gaze was curiously soft.
As dawn broke, a healer came to bind his broken jaw—bandages only, he was told, no healing magic or medicine. He had been lying bleeding on the table for five hours. They marveled that he made no sound or sign of pain, when he must have been in agony.
When the healer had finished, Robespierre sat up. He swung his legs off the table, shying away from the hands that reached to support him, and crossed the five paces to an armchair by the corner window. It was the time of the morning when he usually rose, answered his letters, and made notes, waiting for the barber to shave him and dress his wig. Nobody would come for that today, but the tumbril would be there soon. His sky-blue coat was dark with dried blood and sweat, but he did his best to straighten it, and smooth the silk stockings that had bunched about his ankles. He could manage no more than that. He sat—exhausted, pain racked—to wait.
It was still with him. Perhaps it would be with him until the end. And it was not going to see him afraid.
London
28 July 1794
It was almost dawn when Pitt returned to Downing Street, coming in as quietly as he could to avoid talking to those he knew were lingering downstairs. He had a handful of colleagues somewhere on the premises, but right now he felt he needed quiet more than he needed any of them—and, he hoped, more than they needed him. He’d listened to enough consolation and righteous indignation and barely concealed gloating from his supporters for one evening. A number of them had walked with him right to his carriage outside the House of Commoners and had barely been put off from following him inside.
“I always said he was a wicked, fanatical little imp,” one of them maintained, despite the fact that he wouldn’t have dared say anything of the kind a scant few hours ago.
“W
ell, he isn’t,” Pitt replied. It was all he could muster at that moment. “Good night.”
In his office, surrounded by the comfortingly solid wood paneling and the less comfortingly solid mounds of unanswered correspondence, the Downing Street daemon-stone was humming. It might have been doing so for hours, or mere minutes; everyone had been too preoccupied to notice it. It had a sinister note, a note almost of satisfaction. The very last thing Pitt wanted to do at that moment was touch it, but he forced himself to take up a quill in one hand, poise it over the paper, and take up the stone in the other. He shivered as the cold crept down the back of his neck and the shadows swirled in his head, and then wrote its message down.
He read it back without a flicker of surprise. There was a headache building steadily behind his eyes, and he rubbed his temples briefly to ward it off. At least the votes had gone their way, he tried to tell himself, and dismissed the thought as useless. Of course they had. They had expected them to. It was scarcely the point.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” he called automatically, and suddenly William Wilberforce was there.
It was far from an unusual circumstance: over the last few years, Wilberforce had remained almost a daily visitor to Downing Street, and they’d spent hours talking over war and slavery and thoughts until deep into the night. This was the first time, however, that Pitt had wished he hadn’t come.
“I told them not to announce me,” Wilberforce said awkwardly. His eyes met Pitt’s with an unspoken question. Pitt refused to answer it. “I thought perhaps you’d turn me away.”
“Of course I wouldn’t,” Pitt said, but without warmth. He had drawn himself up without meaning to, and his face had settled into reserve. “I never turn anyone away with business to discuss.”