Queen of the Conquered

by Kacen Callender

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Kheryn Callender

  Excerpt from King of the Rising copyright © 2019 by Kheryn Callender

  Excerpt from The Court of Broken Knives copyright © 2017 by Anna Smith Spark

  Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

  Cover images by Arcangel and Shutterstock

  Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Map © 2019 by Charis Loke

  Author photograph by Beth Phelan

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: November 2019

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Callender, Kacen, author.

  Title: Queen of the conquered / Kacen Callender.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY: Orbit, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019019777| ISBN 9780316454933 (trade pbk.) | ISBN 9780316454919 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316454926 (library ebook) | ISBN 9781549150371 (downloadable audiobook)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.A44624226 Q44 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019777

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-45493-3 (paperback), 978-0-316-45491-9 (ebook)

  E3-20190925-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  MAP

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DISCOVER MORE

  EXTRAS

  MEET THE AUTHOR

  INTERVIEW

  A PREVIEW OF KING OF THE RISING

  A PREVIEW OF THE COURT OF BROKEN KNIVES

  BY KACEN CALLENDER

  For the black and brown bodies that know this pain.

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  PROLOGUE

  My mother kissed my forehead with a smile when I cried, upset that the party would carry on as I was sent away to sleep, and while I lay awake in my bed of lace, huddled beneath my covers and shivering in the cool trade-winds breeze, I heard when the tinkling piano stopped and when the laughter turned to screams. I slipped out of bed and went to my balcony of stone to see the garden below, streaks of yellow light falling from the windows and across the grass where my mother’s guests were ushered to the rose mallow by the men with their drawn machetes. I saw my sisters crying, my brother struggling, my mother pleading as they were forced to their knees. A hand covered my eyes, but I heard the moment their tangled screams were swallowed by silence.

  Tante carried me away from the balcony, breathless, the front of my dress covered with red that was already turning to rust. My voice had been stolen away, but she still kept her calloused hand over my mouth as we ran down the shadowed hall, into an abandoned chamber, snapping a door shut behind us. Men shouted, their boots echoing on the marbled floor.

  “Do exactly as I say,” Tante whispered to me, “or the Jannik guards will find you, and it doesn’t matter that you’re only a child—they’ll kill you, just as they killed your brother and sisters.”

  Tante wouldn’t release my mouth until I nodded that I understood. She opened a closet, then fell to her knees to unlock a trapdoor. She told me to climb down the ladder and walk to the end of the tunnel until I reached the groves. There would be a saltwater river. I was to follow the river until I reached a cave. I was to wait, hidden, until a woman came to look for me. We both knew that woman would not be Tante, because Tante would stay behind in the manor, and she would be killed.

  She saw the fear shining in my eyes. “Your mother would want you to survive. Do you hear me, Sigourney? Your mother would want you to live.”

  I ran, salt drying on my cheeks and nose.

  Guilt that I hadn’t done anything to save them tightening around my neck.

  Most days I find that I still can’t breathe.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The invitation is a plain piece of yellowing parchment, folded shut—thin enough that I can see the red of my fingers shining through, as though the paper is a layer of skin in my hands. The paper itself hasn’t been perfumed with the scent of crushed flower petals, as most posts from the kongelig tend to be. Only the seal of white wax, with the sunburst insignia of Hans Lollik Helle, marks the letter in any way.

  It’s an invitation I’ve been waiting to receive for nearly ten years: a symbol of all I’ve worked for, and everything still to come. I hold it in my hands, staring at the seal, my heartbeat drumming through my veins. Now that the moment has finally arrived, I can’t bring myself to read the words.

  Marieke sweeps into my room with a woven basket of fresh sheets. She sees the letter in my hands, noting the tremble in my fingers before I have a chance to steady them.

  “What’s that?” she asks briskly, even though she knows exactly what it is. She strips the sheets from my bed, and when I don’t answer she says, without sparing me another glance, “Aren’t you going to open it?”

  I place the invitation atop the stand beside my bed.

  Marieke watches me as she straightens my new sheets. Marieke has always valued patience, so it’s almost amusing when she sucks her teeth as she fluffs my pillows. She thinks I’m falling apart. She can’t blame me, she knows—the pressure I’ve put on myself with this goal of mine would be enough to break anyone. I’ve whispered to her at night that this plan is the only reason I’m still alive. Marieke believed me when I told her, and she thought it was sad, too, that a child should ever say that they want to die, but Marieke has known many child
ren who’ve felt life wasn’t worth living.

  There’s been another slave uprising, this time on a sugarcane planation in the fields to the east, so I ride with my twelve personal guardsmen across Lund Helle, through the groves of tangled brush and branches and thorns, weaving beneath the blessed shade of coconut and palm trees, crossing the fields of guinea grass shimmering in the breeze. Lund is the flattest of its sister islands, so the grass stretches on for miles, without any relief from the sun, which seems to reflect against everything here—the white of my dress, the blue of the sea forever shining in the corner of my eye, even the air itself. The heat is a living thing. It burns the corners of my eyes and lips, already cracking from the salt that’s carried from the ocean on the wind.

  The ocean has always terrified me. It isn’t meant for the living. The water, burning my eyes and nose and throat, can so easily fill my lungs; the power of the tide can pull me beneath its waves. Most frightening of all are the spirits. My sister Ellinor would whisper to me that they walk the ocean floor, waiting for their chance at vengeance against the living; that their hands will pull you into the depths, so that your body, like theirs, can turn to salt and sand, and you can join them in waiting for a chance at revenge.

  She’d told me this when I was a girl child, so young I could barely walk anywhere on my own without clutching at my eldest sister’s skirts. I’d wanted to know if what Ellinor said was true, so I walked into the water—walked until I could no longer feel the sand beneath my feet. I took a deep breath and let myself sink beneath the surface and opened my eyes, stinging in the salt. There were no spirits standing in the sand, waiting for their revenge. All I could see was the coral, the schools of fish flashing silver in the light, the seaweed swaying beneath the waves. I decided Ellinor was a liar and turned to swim back to shore, but the tide was strong that day. I was pulled away from the shore. I would have kicked my legs, just as I’d been taught, but it was like I’d become stationary, unable to move. I swam, swallowing saltwater, unable to cry for help, but I was only pulled farther and farther, until I began to wonder if my sister had been right after all and if the spirits had grasped me by my legs, even if I couldn’t see them or feel their hands.

  My limbs became weak and numb, and I sank, my lungs burning and my vision fading away. I should’ve drowned, but when I opened my eyes again, I was back on the sand, salt drying on my skin. No slaves were nearby to claim that they’d jumped into the water and rescued me; my family was still in the gardens, enjoying their tea. It was just me, alone on the shore. The spirits weren’t ready to take me yet.

  I know that the path we take is dangerous. It leaves us too vulnerable, too much in the open. We’re practically inviting an ambush. This would’ve been a silly thought, once, on an island like Lund Helle. The island only has a few sugarcane plantations, with houses scattered in between, but there’ve been three slave uprisings in as many months. Before this, the last uprising was nearly twenty years ago, when Bernhand Lund was still alive and Herre of this island. All the masters of the plantation had been killed. Herre Lund ended the uprising swiftly. Every slave on the plantation, whether they claimed innocence or not—whether they were children or not—was executed, their bodies staked and hung from trees so that the other slaves of this island could see. No other islander has attempted an uprising since, not until now.

  Friedrich rides beside me. “You didn’t have to come,” he says again for the second time this morning. “It’s a simple group of slaves that have now decided to call themselves rebels.”

  “I’m capable of deciding where I need to be, Friedrich.”

  He looks away, scathed. I feel that there’s regret in his gut, regret he hopes I won’t see, though he knows any emotion he has, any thought of his, belongs to me. If I will it, I can hear his thoughts the way I might think to myself; his emotions become my own. It requires effort, yes—energy, to make my mind become one with another’s—but after holding this kraft for so many years, it’s a skill that comes with the ease of racing across the fields of Lund Helle, or holding my breath beneath the sea. I know that Friedrich doesn’t want to kill his own people. Before these uprisings, Friedrich had never killed before, not once in his entire life. He’d been trained to—had learned how to stab and maim and disembowel straw-filled opponents, as have all fifty of the guards of Lund Helle—but he never expected to see his sword shining red. He was surprised how easy it was to take the life of another man. His sword had pressed against the skin of the slave rebel who had run at Friedrich with a machete, and then his sword sliced through that skin and into pink guts, and it stopped as though hitting a rock—the man’s bones, Friedrich later realized—and the man was still alive as Friedrich pulled back his sword, yanking at it with effort. The man looked as surprised as Friedrich felt before he fell to the dirt.

  Friedrich killed three more men that day and, when the fighting was done, walked into the brush so that no one could see him or hear him vomit the cold oats and the juices of the sugarcane he’d swiped from the kitchens that morning. He prayed to the gods of the masters, asking for forgiveness, even though the masters don’t believe that taking the life of an islander is a sin, and so there would be nothing to forgive.

  Friedrich had hoped he would never have to kill another man again. How disappointed he was to hear of another uprising. “The fight won’t last long,” he tells me. “They never do.”

  My horse jerks back and forth beneath me. There’s a clopping of hooves against the rocks scattered across the dirt, kicking dust into the air, already heavy with heat. My cloak sticks to my skin, and my neck and shoulders ache beneath the blistering sun. It’s always hot on this island of mine, but the dry season has lasted a little too long. The crops are failing now, the plantations earning this island less coin every year. Bernhand Lund was put into his grave four years before, and since the title of Elskerinde was passed on to me, there have been nothing but droughts and uprisings. Proof, according to the Fjern of this island, that I shouldn’t have the power that I do.

  Lund Helle has no cities, no towns, only isolated collections of houses, which form small plantations holding its slaves and are owned by the few Fjern who live here. An abandoned house we pass leans to its side, as though the wind blew a little too hard one night. A rotted body hangs from a lone mahogany tree, bones visible through the rags it still wears, flies like a layer of living skin. It’s always difficult to tell in death what color a body had once been in life.

  I see the smoke of the plantation’s houses before we arrive. It gushes black into the bright blue sky and burns my eyes, even from such a distance. There are brown bodies of islanders in the green field, already swelling in the heat—but there’s no way to tell if these men, women, and children fought alongside the slave rebels, or if they were innocents killed in the clash. I see fallen Fjernmen as well, with their pink skin turning purple and blue. The masters of the plantation. I shouldn’t be so pleased, seeing their bodies on the ground.

  I ride closer to the plantation houses, a circle of wooden shacks and lean-tos ablaze. Some bodies have already begun to attract flies. My horse snorts nervously as I throw a leg over and leap to the hard ground, Friedrich and my eleven other guardsmen following. It’s silent—the only sound is the crackling of the fire as it burns each house, splitting wood and stone, making it impossible to get too close as the heat sears the air. I can feel the heat on my skin, my eyes. We stop before a smoldering house that is already crumbling to the ground in embers. A fine layer of sweat and dust and ash covers me.

  “Be careful. Some might have kraft,” says Malthe, the captain of my guard.

  “You think everyone has kraft,” Friedrich mutters, smirking at me to share his joke.

  Malthe has heard. “What was that?”

  Friedrich hesitates. “Nothing, sir.”

  “Do you think this is funny, Friedrich?”

  Embarrassment, then resentment, pulses through Friedrich, but he hides his emotions well. “No, sir.” />
  It’d only been a joke—a joke born in discomfort, I know. It’s always uncomfortable, seeing the dead. The sight of corpses reminds people of the first time they witnessed death: for me, the guests of my mother’s manor, throats and stomachs cut, painting the flowers with their blood as my mother and sisters and brother were forced to their knees. Friedrich’s memory comes to him as well, I can see now: A child, a boy no older than Friedrich had been, hung upside down by his feet as the master of the plantation taught his son archery. Friedrich often thinks about how easily he could have been chosen instead as the living target. That boy haunts his dreams at night, sometimes even now. The child will watch Friedrich with the same empty stare, arrows riddling his body. What had been the difference between them? The boy wants to know.

  Malthe orders the guards to search for survivors. I walk down the path of the desolated plantation. Bodies are sprawled across the floors and straw beds of the slaves’ quarters. In the distance, the fields of sugarcane are alight. Burning fields, charred houses, slaughtered people. This is my legacy.

  Movement in the corner of my eye, a flare of rage—I spin and shout a warning, but too late. A man with a drawn machete has cut a guardsman’s neck, so deeply that his head nearly falls. The rebel, machete shining, swings at Friedrich, but I focus on the slave, his rage and fear of death, yes, he wants to live more than anything else, and his mind becomes my mind as he slices his own gut, mouth open in surprise. More islanders burst from behind blackened houses with yells and screams. Machetes and knives drawn, the rebels clash with the swords of my guards, but there aren’t many of them, and they have to know that they’ll die. I enter another rebel, overtaken for a moment by his hopelessness as I see myself through his eyes, the traitorous island woman in my dress of white, my eyes fluttering as my kraft works through my veins, and he turns on his friends, cutting his fellow rebels down. Each man falls dead to the ground until only the man I’ve used is left. He slices his own neck. Pain sears, blood flowing, weakness filling him as he falls. For a moment, I feel death—know what it is to die, just as I have felt a thousand times. The sudden jolt of a heart stopping in your chest, the shock as your own body betrays you. This is what my mother and sisters and brother must have felt.