A request from @littlestartopaz: Polaris AU set in the American Revolution?
AHAHAHAHA YES. This turned into kind of an ode to Ade North, the woman in command of Polaris, and I have no regrets.
So Polaris is a covert part of the colonial army, stealing patriots out from under the noses of the redcoats. Ade North—North for the star, North for the sky, North for freedom—is a grim-eyed escaped slave, and she knows the risks of what she’s about to do, but she storms straight into the base outside New York City. The General—slave-owner, she diagnoses immediately, at a glance—isn’t the first one she finds, but rather a hot-tempered red-haired captain who grins at her when she tells him that I just walked through gunfire to get here, boy, do you think I’m about to run because someone might try and hang me? He vouches for her, and some strings are pulled, and…well. Her old master is a Tory. She’s not afraid of taking advantage of double-standards when they’re held out to her in both hands. And Ade North has never in her life backed down.
(This is a lie. She ran, once. There was a woman who looked at her and saw something beautiful in Ade’s hard-muscled arms and callous-raw hands, saw the proud and angry soul behind the chains. They met for five years, out under the sky at night, her creamy skin soft against Ade’s and her lips like honey. Ade whispered the meaning of her name, with no one to hear except the stars and Rose, and she smiled her honey-sweet smile and said, “A crown and a rose.” When they were caught, Ade fought like something feral, and Rose hurled herself at a man with a musket, screaming for her to run. The musket went off with a crack, and Rose crumpled to the ground, and Ade ran. She doesn’t know how she lives with herself, sometimes.)
Polaris swells quickly. Ade doesn’t have a rank—women can’t hold rank, blacks can’t hold rank, she’s twice-cursed—but her word is law, and she doesn’t know who starts teasing her with Yes, Major General (it was the red-haired captain who takes a position as the General’s aide) but she also doesn’t care. She has a war to win. Her first three rescues, in no particular order, are a physician, Sebastian, the Chinaman he pays as his surgeon’s mate, Jun Li, and a brilliant man barely into his twenties named James Deaton. They form an iron-clad core, four strong shoulders bearing up the growing weight of patriots stolen from prison ships and jail cells, from work camps and forts.
And then one day Sebastian brings home a girl dressed in the shreds of a high-society gown and a scowl, her dark brown hair hacked ragged around her face.
“Major General, sir,” Sebastian says with a smile, the sort that rests strangely on his serious face, because he shows it so rarely. “I have someone new for you.”
The girl is young, perhaps fifteen, with an upper-class accent and fair skin sprinkled with freckles, but there’s something in her eyes that looks familiar, something that reflects back Ade’s memories of running.
“And what’s your name, little one?” Ade asks, trying to make her gravelly voice as soothing as possible.
The girl opens her mouth, shuts it, squares her jaw. “Max.”
“That’s a boy’s name,” Ade notes, no judgement in her tone.
“I’m a girl, so it’s a girl’s name.” Ade smiles.
“And do you have a family name, Max?”
Max scowls. “No.” Ade nods—she needed a name to prove that she was free. She can understand this child needing to be free from her family name. Max looks back at Ade with the kind of fearlessness that comes from terror and says, “Sebastian told me that you would not call me a witch, if I told you the truth.”
Ade laughs a little at that. “I would not.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Ade’s smile fades, and she rolls up the sleeve of her shirt, cut in a man’s style. A band of scar tissue, old and faded now, wraps her wrist, and she holds out her hand to the fire-flash girl before her. Max reaches out with a gentle finger and touches Ade’s forearm, just above the scar tissue. “We all have our secrets and lies, little one,” Ade says, weary, and this time, when Max looks up at her, the fearless look is honest.
“You were a slave.”
“Yes. If I was revealed to my old master, he would hunt me down with dogs.” Ade bares her teeth. “I would make him, before I returned.”
Max bares her teeth right back, and the snarl sits on her face like it belongs there. If they learn what I can do, they will burn me alive, and I will make them pay for it. Her voice rings out in Ade’s mind like a clarion call, battle drums and fife, and when it’s gone, there’s the acrid flavor of gunsmoke on her tongue.
Oh, Ade likes this little witch-girl.
Max becomes a tremendous asset at once—Polaris is too desperately tight-woven to imagine turning away such a gift. She is of most use away from battles and skirmishes, where she can interlink dozens of minds to communicate instantly, but Max loves the fight. Ade sees it the first time she picks up a musket, turning the gun to watch the sun glisten off the bayonet, and Max is like something wild and hungry in combat. She meets the red-haired captain—now a red-haired colonel, nigh-inseparable from someone Ade mentally labels The Abolitionist—and they get on like a house on fire. (This makes more sense to Ade when she hears a story handed around the campfire of the red-haired captain she met in New York, stealing twenty-one guns from under fire from the Asia. Max, who once convinced an entire garrison of redcoats that they were hearing the souls of dead patriots coming to claim vengeance, cackles like the witch she so devoutly claims not to be, at this story.)
So, close to the end of the war, when the General asks their best and brightest to raid the headquarters of General Gage himself, Max leads the charge. She is captured, presumed dead, and then Ade hears the clarion voice in her mind.
I’m coming home, and I have a new friend.
Ade has not cried since Rose threw herself in front of a musket to give her time to run, but when Max fades and leaves gunsmoke sharp on her tongue, Ade closes her eyes and presses a hand to her mouth and feels a few tears trickle down her cheeks.
She represses a few more, when Max strides into the camp, bloody and bruised and limping, shackles around her wrists with broken chain dangling. There is a girl holding her hand, dressed as Max was, in the tatters of an abandoned upper class, long fair hair tangled with leaves. They cling to each other in a way that makes Ade’s chest ache for moonlight and honey lips, crowns and roses.
“Major General, sir. I have someone new for you. This,” Max says with grim delight, “is Lessa Gage. She’d like to defect.”
“I would like,” Lessa says, stepping toward Ade and sketching something halfway between a bow and a curtsey, “to not be burned alive. I am told you specialize in that.”
“And what can you do?” Ade asks, and if she sounds apprehensive, it’s because she is.
Lessa smiles faintly and looks at Max for encouragement. Max nods, stepping back, and Lessa carefully sidles into a clear area.
She throws a hand into the air as if to summon something from the sky, and white light cracks away from her, like a lightning bolt. The explosion of thunder comes barely a blink of an eye later, and shakes Ade’s heart in her chest.
Lessa lowers her hand, nervous. Max is looking at her as if Lessa personally crafted and lit the lamp of the sun. The surrounding soldiers and spies look like someone just walked over their graves and began talking loudly of exhumation.
“Oh yes,” Ade says, mind already racing with the possibilities. “I think we have room for one more witch-girl to win the war.”