Yes, she thinks. This is exactly how the gods described it.
I release her.
She chokes on air.
I can hear Marieke’s voice. Patience, child.
CHAPTER FOUR
I strip the woman of her latest memories and leave Elskerinde Jannik’s chamber to race down the hall, down the stairs, a surprised Friedrich following me, his thoughts and questions interrupting my own—Is she crying? What happened?—but he says nothing as we rush toward the doors.
I turn a sharp corner and nearly run into the man I’m least expecting: Aksel Jannik.
He’s tall—taller than his father had been, with broader shoulders. His pale hair, the same color as his mother’s, is combed away from his face. His white shirt is buttoned to the neck, despite the heat in this airless hall, and his riding breeches and boots are spotless. He’s alone. Aksel never has guardsmen with him—a foolish move on his part, an oversight based on his own arrogance. He hates the idea of being followed everywhere by a slave, having to share the same space with someone who has skin as dark as mine. He doesn’t think he needs to depend on a slave to save his life if he’s ever attacked. He thinks he’s above death. I can’t wait to prove him wrong.
Aksel doesn’t seem as surprised to see me. He’s probably been here all along. I’m weak, feeling faint after working through Freja Jannik’s thoughts, and Aksel has become rather good at hiding his mind from me over the past year. It was only in the beginning that I could feel how much he despised me.
“Elskerinde Lund,” he says in greeting.
“Aksel,” I say, forcing a smile.
His eyes, the dark brown of his father’s, flit to Friedrich, still standing beside me. “Leave us,” he says.
Friedrich doesn’t move. “Elskerinde Lund?” he questions. I can hear in his voice that he takes particular pleasure in ignoring Aksel’s command.
“Prepare the carriage,” I tell him. “I’ll only be a moment.”
Friedrich’s footsteps fade, and Aksel and I are left alone in the hall.
Aksel isn’t so different from Friedrich: One emotion I can still sense is his envy. Aksel Jannik’s kraft allows him to sense when another has an ability in their veins, and to know what that power is, the level of that person’s strength. Whenever he meets me, my kraft flows into him, and he knows that I’m strong and that he’s weak.
He eyes me. “I’m surprised you’re here again.”
“I enjoy visiting your mother.”
“But so often?”
“You don’t resent my visits, do you?”
Of course he does.
His arms are stiff. “She needs her rest.”
“I’d like to think I bring her peace.”
“You don’t know what brings my mother peace,” he says, and I can feel the rage simmering beneath his calm facade. I’m not sure even I understand the depths of his hatred for me, the islander he’s being forced to marry. He doesn’t trust me, and with reason. It was only when I began to call on Elskerinde Jannik two years before that she started to insist that I marry her son. Even Aksel, as dim as he can be, is suspicious. That his mother had even agreed to accept me as a guest had been worrying to him; then for her, a year after meeting me, to tell him that she wanted us to unite in name, he knew that his mother had fallen victim to my manipulation. He doesn’t know for sure if it was my kraft—has no proof I’ve used my abilities on his mother—but he suspects I might have. Still, he doesn’t complain. He loves another member of the kongelig, a Fjern woman I’ve only ever met in his thoughts, but her coin and her blood is nothing in comparison to the Lund family’s wealth and the power of my kraft. Marrying her might as well mean forfeiting any chance he has to receive the blessing of Konge Valdemar.
“I heard there was another slave uprising on Lund Helle.” He says this without a smile, though I can hear it in his voice.
I flinch, remembering the slaves—the girl, crying on her knees. I don’t bother asking how he knows such a thing, or searching for the answer in his thoughts; word travels fast in these islands, and gossip flows stronger than blood. “And they failed.”
“If you aren’t careful, the Jannik family might inherit your enemies.”
“The Lund family is strong enough that it doesn’t matter which enemies you inherit. You should be grateful.”
His thoughts stab through me—thoughts he throws at me, wanting me to hear: I will never be grateful to marry you. I’ll wake up every morning, knowing that I’ve sacrificed my life, my happiness, for the sake of my family—but never think I’ll be grateful to marry you.
He turns his back to me, marching down the corridor, dismissing me without another word.
I leave the front hall of Herregård Mønsted and return to the carriage where Friedrich waits. I feel his curiosity, but Friedrich doesn’t ask about my feelings toward Aksel and if we really hate each other as much as we seem to.
We journey back to Lund Helle. By the time the ship anchors in its bay once more and we’re outfitted atop our horses, the sun peeks over the ocean’s horizon, sky a transparent pink, the air fresh with the relief of a salted morning breeze. My twelve personal guardsmen ride behind me in a line, as always, and Friedrich’s horse clops alongside mine as we cut through valleys. These are my brief moments of peace: closing my eyes, feeling the heat of the island on my cheeks. I pretend to have a different life. One where my family is not dead, and I’m still in the home where I spent my first years on Rose Helle, running through my mother’s maze of hedges and stealing mango tarts from the kitchen; Inga singing her clear, high voice through the halls.
I remember the stories my mother whispered to me and Ellinor as we sat upon her lap in the gardens. Stories about our people, and these islands that had once been our own. All of the sea belonged to us—all of the sand, the dirt, the fruit, the trees. The powers that flowed through the veins of the blessed were celebrated and nurtured—gifts from our ancestors and the spirits that surround us. These islands had a name, a language, a history, before the Fjern ever arrived. A name, a language, a history—now lost. Even as a child, I mourned for what the islands had once been, longed to know the name my people had once called these lands.
The Fjern came over hundreds of years before. They raided our villages, taking our homes and slaughtering our people. The lands we had once called home were renamed the islands of Hans Lollik, and the Fjern replaced our language with their own. Anyone who dared speak the mother tongue had their own cut from their mouth. I sometimes feel a disgust for myself, that I speak the language of the Fjern and hold a name with their roots. What would my name have been had the Fjern never come to these islands? The hollow in my chest wishes to know.
The Fjern claimed these islands as Koninkrijk territory and granted a regent to rule. The regent has his advisers, known as the kongelig, who are born of the wealthiest and most powerful families of these islands. It’s no coincidence that every member of the kongelig has kraft, allowing them to rise above the other Fjern who have left Koninkrijk to come to Hans Lollik. The Fjern claim only the kongelig and their descendants may hold kraft, but never once have I seen them execute one of their own, while my people with kraft are routinely rooted out, hung, beheaded, drowned. There’d once been hundreds of thousands of my people across these islands. Now half of that number remains—and of those who survive, I’m the only one who has my freedom, beyond Marieke, whose freedom I have given.
But the Fjern have always been pragmatic. Islanders were promised to be released from slavery if they managed to pay for their life. My ancestor Wilhelm Rose did just that. He’d been a slave on a plantation of Niklasson Helle and was to work the fields for his master from dawn until dusk; after dark, he returned to his own garden behind the slaves’ quarters and grew lemongrass, which he then sold on the dock’s markets before the sun could rise.
The Fjern who bought his lemongrass didn’t question if the coin would go to Wilhelm’s master or stay in his own pocket; they assumed he’d
been sent on an errand, as so many other slaves in the market were. If they’d known Wilhelm sold the lemongrass for his own profit, they never would’ve bought his lemongrass; but his loyal customers had to admit that there was something special about his grass, the strength of its taste, the brightness of its flavor. His grass seemed to cure any ailment, to cheer any mood, and it became popular enough that he earned more coin than even some of the Fjern selling their grass and herbs. Wilhelm worked like this and saved his coin for ten years, I was told. He buried the coin he saved in the very garden where he worked into the night, without his master’s knowledge.
Claus told me that another slave saw Wilhelm burying his coin and attempted to dig up and steal the treasure for himself. Wilhelm caught the man and struck him in the head with a stone, killing him, then dragged his body to the rocky shore to make it seem he’d fallen and hit his head as he attempted to escape the island. Claus had told all of this to me, though I can’t see how my brother would’ve known something like this. Claus, like my sister Ellinor, had a habit of telling stories for the sake of entertainment, regardless of whether they were true or not. Still, the ending must be the same, whether our ancestor was a murderer or not: Once he had enough coin saved, he approached his master with the price of his life.
At first, the master reneged on the promise of Wilhelm’s freedom and simply took the bag of coin for himself. But when my mother told me the tale, she said that the master’s wife had a softer heart—rare for the Fjern. She convinced the man to release Wilhelm, and he was allowed to leave the plantation with only his name and the clothes on his back. My mother tells me that the plantation had been covered with rose-mallow flowers, so Wilhelm, as he left with his freedom, decided to give himself the family name of Rose. He had nowhere to go and no coin to depend on for survival. Wilhelm knew he could easily be captured by any Fjern, who would sell him or accuse him of escaping and have him killed, but he also had no way of making it to the north, where he had heard others with brown skin lived with their freedom.
Wilhelm took a risk. It was the only choice he had. He approached Fjern families on the streets of Niklasson Helle, claiming he had a knowledge of working the fields that no other islander would share because of their anger at being enslaved—a knowledge that no Fjern held, as they didn’t know these islands as he did. Wilhelm boldly promised he could help their business grow if they allowed him to become a partner in their crop. At first the Fjernmen found him amusing, this islander who had bought his own freedom and thought he could become their equal. Their amusement quickly dwindled. Within days, laughter turned to shouts and threats. He was spat at, until one day, a Fjernman knocked him across the face, and the man and his friends kicked Wilhelm as he lay curled up on the ground. If he’d fought back, he’d undoubtedly have been hung for striking a Fjern.
It was Wilhelm’s luck that Patrick Lund happened to walk by at that moment. Patrick was no better than any of the other Fjern of these islands: He thought himself above islanders as well, but he pitied Wilhelm the way he would if he saw a gang of boys kicking a dog. He insisted Wilhelm be left alone. Patrick Lund, my mother told me, was a soft-spoken gentleman, but commanding all the same. The Fjernmen left Wilhelm on the streets, and Patrick offered him safe passage from Niklasson Helle. When asked why he’d been attacked, Wilhelm explained that he wished to become a partner in a Fjern family’s crop business. Patrick Lund was intrigued. The family’s tobacco plantation had been failing for some time and was near ruin. Wilhelm was invited to Lund Helle to teach any tricks he might have in exchange for coin. Wilhelm, it turned out, could see the issue clearly: The soil was not right for tobacco. He suggested the Lund try their hand at sugarcane instead. Patrick Lund did this, and the sugarcane thrived within months.
The Lund family had been on the precipice of ruin, and Patrick still needed Wilhelm’s knowledge of the crop. He agreed to allow Wilhelm to become a partner. Wilhelm lived on the plantation, in a house he built himself, and he married a slave girl. They had a child, and by the end of his life, the Lund sugarcane business had become so profitable that Wilhelm had acquired more wealth than some of the poorest Fjern families.
His family line continued, and the Lund and Rose sugarcane business survived the attacks of anyone who felt a man of my people didn’t deserve such wealth. Eventually the Rose married into the Lund family. This was Ellinor’s favorite story to tell: a son of the Rose, who fell in love with a daughter of the Lund. Ellinor found the story romantic, and would add elaborate tales of how they had to secretly meet in the gardens to keep the love they had for one another hidden. I was too young to understand the stiffness in my mother’s gaze whenever Ellinor would tell this story of hers, but I do understand now: Our people have no love for the Fjern, and the Fjern have no love for us. This must’ve been a painful business proposal.
Still, it was the best political move for both families. No Fjern would agree to marry the Lund after they joined in business with a family of islanders. The Rose had been their only allies. The families joined together were fortified all the more, and eras later, ten generations of free Rose sons, with their black skin and thick hair, had maneuvered the politics and coin of the islands so deftly that my grandfather managed to claim an island of his own. It was a small island, useless for plantations, but it was his. He was the first and only native of these islands to do so, passing Rose Helle on to my father.
Even after my father’s passing, my mother held the family’s strength, and the Rose name continued to grow. She seemed to possess all knowledge of the workings of the islands: she managed the sugarcane business alongside the Lund and the politics of the kongelig so swiftly that some still whisper that she had been blessed with kraft, though no one ever directly accused her of it. When the family line of the kongelig Holm family ended with no heir, the regent of Hans Lollik invited my mother to stay on the royal island for the storm season, officially making ours the seventh family of the kongelig.
But the regent is aging now, and Konge Valdemar has no successor. Ten years ago he announced he would choose one at the end of this era from any of the viable kongelig families. The era concludes with the end of the coming storm season, in two months’ time.
And so I will have two months to convince Konge Valdemar to choose me.
Two months to destroy the remaining kongelig families.
Wind rushes across the fields of Lund Helle before it dies down again. The winds bring dark, mountainous clouds that block the sun, threatening rain and thunder, but the clouds don’t stop over Lund Helle, and the sky is blue and bright again within moments, the sun scalding my hands as I grip my horse’s reins. The rain showers steam far out at sea in the distance.
“By the gods,” Friedrich says, “sometimes I forget how beautiful this island is. It’s enough to make me want to settle a small piece of land and build a house of my own.”
This is a joke of his, knowing that he’ll never be able to do such a thing without his freedom. The hatred in Friedrich for me simmers, but he pushes it aside. There’s no point in allowing himself to hate me, no point in giving in to his rage. He’d have nowhere to place that anger, unless he wanted to attempt to take my life, forfeiting his own. I wonder if, in a way, I’ve forced Friedrich to think that he loves me. I didn’t place the thought in his mind, as I’ve placed thoughts in Elskerinde Jannik’s—but if Friedrich isn’t able to hate me, perhaps the only other choice is for him to believe he loves me instead.
I try to ignore the desire for a peaceful life that bubbles inside me. It’d be easy. No one knows I escaped the slaughter in my family’s manor. A little slave girl’s body was found in one of my dresses, so my family’s murderers think I was killed along with everyone else who was there that night. It’d be easy to let my cousin Herre Bernhand Lund’s legacy pay for a cottage house in the countryside, perhaps with a view of the ocean and some goats of my own. I could marry a gentle farmer, or maybe even Friedrich, and have children—daughters and a son—whom I’d name aft
er my sisters and brother. It would be easy. Easy to ignore the invitation to Hans Lollik Helle.
We cross the fields before turning to the shadow of a grove, mahogany trees’ leaves shining green, bristling in the breeze. A bird calls and another answers. These groves remind me of the ones on Rose Helle that I would dash through with Ellinor, our nurse racing after us. Ellinor had whispered to beware the woman in white: She was one of the many vengeful spirits, my sister had said, who looks like a beautiful woman with pale skin and yellow hair, until she smiles her mouthful of needlelike teeth.
Friedrich stops his horse beside me, a frown of confusion marring his face. He grips his reins tightly as his horse steps back nervously. I look ahead to see a tree fallen across the road. A single tree, so thin it could be chopped in two with the right machete and the right muscles, roots pulled from the dirt and tangled in the air like branches. There must have been a windstorm that pushed the tree over, yet Friedrich’s uncertainty spreads.
“What’s wrong?” I ask him. His answer comes to me as he speaks.
“Could be a setup for an ambush. We should turn around.”
I try not to laugh. “It’s more likely just a fallen tree, Friedrich. It’s in their nature to fall.”
He turns to me to speak, mouth open, but before he makes a sound, an arrow flies and lands in his throat. Red splatters across my face. Air is sucked from the grove.
The horse stands on his rear legs. Friedrich’s body leans, and thumps to the ground. Malthe shouts as my guardsmen leap from their horses. I follow, stumbling to the dirt, Friedrich unmoving beside my feet, blood and muscle blossoming where the arrow protrudes from his neck, his eyes wide with surprise—islanders have emerged from the trees, the brush, machetes drawn. There aren’t many—only four, no, five—but these aren’t slaves now calling themselves rebels. These men are trained. They clash with my guards, swiping left and right, dodging expertly, stabbing swords into my soldiers’ chests and necks. Six of my own fall to the ground, and only six more stand. This is a fight we could lose. A fight that we are losing.
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