When they gave her the food that would spellbind her, she swallowed it. She wanted to. In her village, when the children had talked about the ghosts that took people over the seas, they had said that your mind fell asleep under the spell. They said it was like dying, and she wanted to die.
She waited while the creeping numbness took her fingers and her toes and her heart. She waited until she felt her breathing become harsh and regular and her tears stop. At last she could not move even her eyes. She waited for her thoughts to still in the same way, as she might wait to fall asleep on a hot night; she longed for it, as an escape from the fear and the pain. But it never came. Her body was asleep. Her mind was still awake inside. When she realized this, she screamed and screamed, but her screams never made it farther than her own head.
All the way across the world, she was awake. She couldn’t move unless they told her to, not even a finger, not even to make a sound. She breathed; she blinked; she retched when the motion of the ship became too much. Outside of this and other such involuntary spasms, she was helpless. But she felt everything. She felt the bite of iron at her wrists and the cramping of her muscles as her limbs lay rigid in the small space. She felt the grain of the wooden floor against her skin as the ship rocked, rubbing until her back and legs were raw and bleeding. She smelled the urine and blood and vomit, and she heard the strange, jarring language of the men tromping the decks overhead. Sometimes, right before they were fed and the last dose of the spell was beginning to wear off, she heard the others in the hold begin to groan or sob or speak. All day, she fought to make a sound herself, just enough to call out and see if any of her family were there to answer her. But then the men would come with their food again, and the hold would fall silent. If someone else had died, that was when they took the bodies away. Sometimes they took people away who were still alive, and did things to them. She didn’t know what they did, but they came back more broken, and sometimes they didn’t come back at all.
She didn’t know where her family was, and everything hurt so much. She was a child. She had never hurt like that before.
After they sold her in the marketplace, they branded her. Part of this was to mark her, once and for all, as property. She belonged to a sugar plantation now, in Jamaica. In time, she would learn what that meant.
The other part was to test that the spellbinding really had taken effect entirely. One of the men in line in front of her let out a strangled noise when the iron seared his flesh, and he was taken away. She didn’t know what happened to him.
She was perfectly bound now. The metal touched her skin and scorched it with heat that seemed to go clear through to the bone. In her head, she writhed and screamed. Her body never made a sound.
Her new owners named her Fina. From now on, she was to answer to that name, and that alone.
France
Camille Desmoulins was five years old, and he was playing with shadows.
It was midsummer’s eve, and Guise was sleepy and sunbaked in the deepening twilight. Camille was outside the main town, down by the river, where the grass grew thick under the old stone bridge. He was too young to be away from home alone, but his father was at work, and his tutor, on such a languid evening, was content to believe that his pupil liked to study alone. Soon, he would enter the tiny makeshift schoolroom to check on his charge and realize, with irritation and alarm, that he had wandered away again, but that would come too late. In fact, Camille did like to study alone. Today, though, his magic had stirred in his blood and set his heart racing. He had come to the river to make the shadows dance.
The shadows with which he played weren’t shadows of anything in particular, or they didn’t seem to be. They lurked in cracks and crevices between the borders of this world and another, watching and waiting. Camille stirred them with a feather touch, as lightly as he could, and they responded at once. He swirled them in the air, the way one might swirl a leaf in the water, making patterns, watching the ripples. He paused once to scratch his wrist, where his bracelet was beginning to heat in response to his magic. The bracelet had been locked about his arm from infancy, as was the case for all Commoner magicians. Its smooth metallic band was meant to grow with him, but it always felt too tight. It felt particularly so today. The air was translucent with light and shade.
It was at this point that he usually stopped, before his bracelet could scald him further. This time, however, he did not. The evening bewitched him. It all seemed a lucid dream: the green-blue sky, the cool water, the warmth of the summer air. He reached out with his magic, and pulled.
The shadows began to converge. What had been faint wisps of darkness gathered in front of him in a tall plume like smoke. His bracelet burned at his wrist, hotter and hotter. He drew the shadows closer. They struggled; his heart beat in his chest like a kite tugging at the end of a rope in a high wind. The plume of smoke-darkness writhed, twisted—and then, at last, resolved itself into a single black shadow. Human-formed, trailing lighter fragments like whispers of fog. It turned to Camille and looked at him.
Something was screaming: a high, piercing note that penetrated the haze of magic and heat. Dimly, Camille recognized that it was coming from his wrist. His bracelet wailed a long note of warning, and still it burned, hotter than ever, so hot that reflexive tears spilled down his cheeks. But the pain was nothing compared to the wonder he felt. There was a living shadow in front of him, and it was real, and it was him but not him at once. It was tall and thin—a human shape, yes, but one that had been stretched like dough under a baker’s hands.
The shadow regarded him for a long moment. Then, quite deliberately, it bowed. Camille bowed back, his burning wrist held clumsily apart from his body. It was as though his soul had opened its eyes for the first time.
“Get back!” Without further warning, a pistol shot cracked the air. There was a faint hiss as the shot passed through vapor, and then the shadow was gone. Nothing but a smoke trail was left to show it had ever been there.
Camille screamed. The bullet had not hit him, yet he felt it sear as though through his heart, and the nothingness that came to engulf him in its wake was worse. His cries joined the wail of the bracelet, as though both were being killed together. He screamed, over and over, as the crowd drawn from the village by his bracelet’s alarm rushed forward. He was still screaming as Leroy the blacksmith grabbed him by the arms and held him roughly, careful to avoid the shrieking piece of hot metal at his wrist. He still screamed as the Knight Templar from the village came on the scene. He screamed right until the Templar, fumbling, touched his bracelet with the spell to silence the alarm, and then he stopped so abruptly that some of the onlookers thought he was dead. He wasn’t. He was white and limp, but gasping, as Leroy caught him up in his arms and took him to the Temple Church.
He was in the underground cell for twelve hours. The Templar tried to offer him food, and even words of comfort. Camille was a tiny waif, with eyes too big for his face under a fringe of black curls, and the Templar was not a monster. The child remained curled up in the corner, unresponsive, shaking, and distraught.
It was perhaps the best thing he could have done, though he could not have known or cared. By the early hours of the morning, Jean Benoit Nicolas Desmoulins had come to bargain, quietly, for the freedom of his son. He was a well-connected man in the town, a lawyer and lieutenant general of the local bailliage; it was unlikely under any circumstances that Camille would be convicted of illegal magic and carted off to the Bastille like a common street urchin. But by the time Desmoulins arrived with his purse and his double meanings, the Templar was unnerved enough by the small, haunted figure in the bowels of the church that he was willing to surrender him without a fight. He had taken illegal magicians before—even underage ones, even in Guise. He was used to their fear and their guilt. Little Camille was incapacitated by neither. He could not imagine what was happening in the child’s head, but it sent a shiver down his spine.