Queen of the Conquered

by Kacen Callender

  And Aksel watched Løren. He smiled at his half brother, knowing the other’s secret. Løren lay awake at night, waiting for the hands that would drag him to the hanging tree, but they never came.

  Løren trained every morning for hours, preparing to become a member of the Jannik guard; and after training, he would work on the plantation, pulling weeds in the lines of crops or running errands for the Elskerinde, who always had such a burning hatred for him. One afternoon, Løren was sent to pick fruit for the kitchens, when he found Aksel already waiting for him in the groves. Aksel held a machete. Løren was afraid his brother had finally found the courage to kill him, but even still, Aksel wouldn’t swing the blade. Løren asked him why he wouldn’t—asked him why Aksel hadn’t yet told their father of his brother’s kraft.

  Aksel had intended to kill Løren himself, but Løren could see the uncertainty in his brother’s eyes. Aksel dropped the machete.

  “I’ll have you killed one day,” Aksel had said, and Løren could feel the truth in his brother’s promise. “But not yet.”

  Løren doesn’t speak. I struggle to catch my breath, my mind still reeling from the memories, the thoughts, the flood of emotion. After nearly a decade of seeing into the minds of others, I’ve learned that most live just above the surface, gliding from day to day. But this mind knows what life is worth. Løren is so fully aware of his own impending death that his spirit radiates, honoring his life with every ounce of being. He feels like a bolt of lightning striking and searing the earth.

  I want to know more. The wall isn’t back up yet. I sink into him once again, and memories rush through me: Løren, crying at night after a beating, running through the groves as Aksel hunts him; Løren, sure that this time his brother would hang him from a tree and watch as he fought to breathe—

  “You want to be the heroine of your story,” he tells me. “You don’t want to be the villain to your people. You want to convince me of your worth. If you convince me of your worth, then perhaps you’re worthy of the love of our people, too.”

  Embarrassment runs through my veins, growing stronger as I realize he can sense this emotion in me. The shame clogs my throat, making it difficult to swallow, impossible to speak. I hadn’t realized that Løren could see into me, just as I could see into him when he brought his wall down. His kraft allows a path between us. His ability to see my thoughts is weak, more an aftereffect of my own. He can sense only the strongest emotions in me. He can’t control me, though he’s tried. When I came to visit him in the library, he held the wall between us, but for just a moment he tried to reach into me, to control my body as I’m able to control others. He couldn’t do it. He would’ve had me cut my own stomach open if he could. He would’ve had me kill myself, and he would’ve run.

  He wants to run, even now, and escape the islands of Hans Lollik. But his brother would happily use the excuse to have Løren captured and finally killed, as he should’ve been so many times before. Løren had been sent to his death when he was ordered to kill me in the groves of Lund Helle. I wasn’t supposed to have survived and taken him prisoner. But he’s grateful, that much he can admit to himself, no matter how much he hates me. And he does hate me. He looks at me and sees fire, tastes blood, smells the rot of his people’s bodies. I saved his life, but he wants to escape me as much as he wants to escape his brother. He’s my guard, but I can see that Løren will kill me if he has the chance.

  There’s no block between us. I wonder if he’s using kraft on me now—looking into my thoughts, feeling my fears and my hopes, just as I see his own. I now know what everyone around me feels: the uncertainty, the fear that my body isn’t my own. But there’s another emotion also, one I don’t completely understand. I hope that Løren will look into me and know me completely, more than anyone else ever has—that he won’t feel pity for me, or a false love for me, but an understanding. I want him to understand me. To realize that I’m not the villain everyone says I am. To comfort me, and tell me there’s no need to hate myself as much as I do.

  Løren watches me with his steady eyes. “The kongelig will never let you become regent,” he tells me. “Konge Valdemar will never choose you or the Jannik name to succeed him.”

  The wall is between us again, hard as the rocks that stand against the crashing sea.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  After stopping at an inn for the night, there’s only a day’s more journey over particularly rocky hillsides of browning grass, as though the rains haven’t fallen on this side of the island in quite some time. There are villages here, houses cramped together on roads of dirt and stone jostling me and Løren back and forth, while Malthe clops alongside the carriage. My other eleven personal guardsmen flank the carriage, while the remaining twenty Lund guards follow behind in close procession. Fjern villagers and their few slaves pause, watching us pass, distrust in their eyes.

  The Ludjivik estate emerges over the crest of a hill. There are no guards awaiting an attack, prepared for battle. The groves surrounding the stone manor are failing, that much is easy to see, and the house itself seems to be crumbling before my very eyes. I try to remember what I learned of the Ludjivik as a child. The daughter who died at a young age, the wife who took her own life in grief. Though he has cousins scattered across all the islands of Hans Lollik, Gustav Ludjivik lives here alone. The pity in me for the man grows, yet this is the man I was sent here to kill.

  The carriage stops outside the doors, and a slave hurries to greet us with downcast eyes. She invites me into the manor, but puts a hand up to Malthe.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “No guardsmen are allowed inside.”

  Malthe must think the slave is joking, because he only continues on toward the doors, but she steps in his way. “It’s an order from Herre Gustav Ludjivik himself.”

  “It’s okay, Malthe,” I say. “I can defend myself if I need to.” This is what I say, even though I’m not sure it’s the truth—but I’m also sure that if we argue for the guards to join me, the bloodshed will begin here and now, before I’ve had a chance to kill Herre Gustav Ludjivik, as I’d been ordered to do. If there are guards waiting within, I’ll have a chance to run back to my own guardsmen, who will easily overpower the Ludjivik.

  The floors here are made of wood, not marble; they’ve lost their shine after generations of scuffing by shoes and heels, and some of the floorboards seem to be accumulating mold. The wallpaper is rotting with stains—water, leaked from the ceiling. There are no paintings, no rugs, no grand furniture. The Ludjivik family is barely hanging on by a thread.

  I follow the slave to the sitting room, where Herre Gustav Ludjivik already waits. His scouts must’ve warned their Herre of our oncoming arrival days before. Gustav Ludjivik seems to be falling apart just as much as his own estate: his pale skin, so white and translucent that I see the veins beneath, as well as the tremble in his legs as he struggles to stand, suggest that a disease has entered his bones. A quick scan of his jittered mind confirms my thoughts. He survived a storm-season sickness years before, but his lungs haven’t cooperated as they should, and every night the man wakes coughing and wheezing, skin slicked with sweat.

  He presses his lips together. “Please, sit down.” He gestures to the couches, fabric thin after years of wear.

  It’s perverse, being welcomed into the house of the man I’m meant to kill, but still I move to sit. I clench my hands together. I shouldn’t waste time. I should complete what I came here to do.

  I take a look around the sitting room and the old furniture that once must’ve had value, though they’re now out of fashion. I think of how lonely it must be in this manor—how easy it could be to convince yourself that you’re more than you’re worth and that you deserve to rule all of Hans Lollik. Gustav Ludjivik is sick, in both mind and body—but that doesn’t mean he deserves to die, or that I should be the one to kill him.

  The man’s mind is open in its weakness. I can see flashes of memory. He was born in these islands. He thinks of them as home as
much as I do. He’s never even seen the empire to the north. His father had whispered to him when he was a child: Their family has always lived in ruin, yes, but they are kings. They deserve the crown. They’ve been blessed by the gods with their divine gifts. They have skin paler than all the other Fjern, even after generations of being under this sun on these islands. They deserve to have their family name rule as regent.

  The pale-skinned Fjern often believe they deserve so much. And why shouldn’t they? They’re told they own the world from the moment they’re born, brought wailing into this world and put into their smiling mother’s arms rather than taken away and sold to the highest bidder. If I’d been told as a child that I deserve to own all I see, maybe I would believe it, too. But it’s because I haven’t been told this, and they have, that I’ll succeed over them; this I know, because while they sit and wait to be handed this world, I’ll work and I’ll fight for my position. I’ll succeed, while they wait for me to fail.

  Gustav Ludjivik knows that he’ll never be named regent. He’s sent nearly all of the slaves and guardsmen of his manor to the other islands and told them to fight for their freedom. He has no use for the slaves of a dying estate. He knows they won’t return. He knows he won’t succeed in his rebellion. He knows, too, that I’ve come to kill him.

  I speak, still delaying the inevitable. “How long have you been sick, Herre Ludjivik?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I suppose you haven’t had visitors in some time. You don’t want anyone to know you’re sick. You wouldn’t want to be seen as weak.”

  “Why’re you here, Elskerinde Sigourney Jannik?” he asks, and he doesn’t mean his estate. He knows why I’ve come to him. He means to know why I’m here, in these islands. “Do you feel you’re a royal of Hans Lollik now?”

  Gustav Ludjivik is like so many of the other kongelig. Watching in amused wonder as I make my way up the ranks of the islands of Hans Lollik. Astonishment that the king doesn’t seem to realize that my skin is as dark as a slave’s as he invited me into his meeting room, as though he considers me one of the kongelig—as though he really might consider handing me the crown. Entertainment. Yes, that’s the word Løren had used: I’m entertainment to these kongelig, who haven’t yet bothered to kill me because they keep waiting for someone else to do it first rather than waste their own energy and resources.

  This is Gustav Ludjivik’s last regret: that he’ll be killed by me, a slave. The king should’ve sent my husband to take the man’s life. My husband, or even any of the pale-skinned women of Hans Lollik Helle. But to send me is to make a mockery of his death.

  He’d been ready to die. Had been willing to take the blade with honor, fearless; but now this insult angers him. “I remember your mother well,” he tells me. “She also thought she was a royal of Hans Lollik Helle.”

  The mention of my mother jolts me. He sees this and smiles. “She was beautiful, your mother,” he tells me, “for a slave. She was never insulting. Forever polite, knowing that if anything she said was taken as an insult, she’d be hung by her neck. Always pleasant, so pleasant. And still, she was murdered in her own home, along with the rest of your family. How does that feel, Sigourney Rose? Knowing that even after trying so hard to bend to the will of the kongelig, they killed her?”

  He’s angry that I’m the one who’s been sent to take his life. He thinks he’ll die with dignity if he reminds me of my place. He’s imagined his death many times now: swift, a blade across the neck, or maybe even his head removed completely. These are the fastest and easiest ways to die, the killings of a merciful executioner. There’re so many awful ways to die on these islands. Herre Ludjivik has witnessed them all, and even ordered a few of those deaths himself: burned at the stake; tied by the wrists and left to have the seawater, breeze, and birds pick away at your skin until you’re nothing but bones. Being hung from the neck could be merciful if the neck snaps, but it would likely end with you kicking desperately, choking on your own tongue. Drowning: That’s what Herre Ludjivik fears most of all. He fears having rocks tied to his ankles sinking him into the depths of the sea, lungs burning as he swallows water. Out of the many ways to die, I have to agree. I fear drowning most of all.

  “You, a slave, believe you’ll be chosen as regent by marrying that fool of a boy, Aksel Jannik, but the Jannik name carries no weight in these lands, or on Hans Lollik Helle. It holds no respect or power. There isn’t a chance Konge Valdemar will choose your name to follow his own.”

  I humor Herre Ludjivik. “And so you’ll have your family replace the Jannik on Hans Lollik Helle?” I ask. “Why would Konge Valdemar choose you?”

  “I have my successors—equally worthy.”

  “In no one’s eyes but your own,” I tell him. “The rebellions across Lund and Nørup Helle—”

  “I thought they might get your attention.”

  “You’ve declared war not only on the Jannik and Nørup names, but on all of Hans Lollik.”

  I’ve now started the path I must complete. Gustav Ludjivik clenches his jaw. “Do you believe in dying for what you believe in, Elskerinde Jannik?”

  The question surprises me. “I do.”

  “And so you believe in killing for what you believe in, too.”

  He says this as fact, not a question. It’s not one I’d be proud to admit the answer to aloud, but I know the truth as well as I know air, as well as I know the sea. This, ultimately, is what makes me a kongelig.

  Gustav Ludjivik watches me from his seat, waiting for me to begin, and so I enter his mind. There’s overwhelming hopelessness in him. It’s the sort of hopelessness that’s dangerous as it seeps into my own skin and makes me wonder if there’s any point to continuing as I do. There’s his hatred for me, his disgust—and a warmth flourishing in him as he thinks that if the stories of the gods are true, there’s a chance he might see his wife and daughter again soon. I force his lungs to constrict, his airways to close. He begins to choke. This is how it would feel, he thinks, to drown—gasping for air, his chest on fire, his head tightening with pressure. I watch him, hands going to his own throat, grasping—his heart stopping in his chest.

  There’re no guards waiting to take their revenge. He sent all the fighting slaves to other islands and to their deaths. I return to Malthe and the carriage, Løren still waiting inside, and we leave the estate to arrive at the same inn previously used by nightfall. I try not to think of the monster I am, for when I do, the sickness rises. I might pretend that I had no choice but to take Herre Gustav Ludjivik’s life, but I did—yes, of course I did. I could’ve disobeyed the king, could’ve left the islands of Hans Lollik and found myself the life of peace that still comes to me in my dreams.

  Løren plans to sleep in the slaves’ quarters of the inn with the other guards, but I ask him to follow me to my room. The room is cramped, dark, and filled with heat, even as a breeze flows through the small window. The room makes me feel nostalgic. It reminds me of my days traveling the northern empires with Marieke at my side. The cities were so large, made of stone and wood, piss and filth slicking the streets. No one cared about the color of my skin there. They would try to take advantage of us, yes—we didn’t know the languages that slipped off tongues, didn’t know the customs, and had too much money. It was days after my tenth birthday, when I began to bleed between my legs, that I heard their whispered thoughts and felt their deceit.

  My sisters and brother, older than me, didn’t have kraft, and neither did my father. My mother had never sat me down and warned me of the possibility. I’d heard rumors that she might’ve had kraft, but she never denied or affirmed this to any of us. And so, though she’d once warned me of the blood that might come between my legs, cramps splitting through my stomach and my sides, she didn’t tell me that I might begin to feel a power in my veins. I thought I was going mad. I could hear the whispers of sellers who sneered at us with bright, pleasant smiles. The cost of bread was half of the coin they were asking from us; the cost of the roo
m where we stayed was only two coins, when they had asked for ten. I was afraid to tell Marieke. Afraid that she would say I’d fallen sick, and would no longer travel with me.

  It was only one night as we sat by the fire at an inn when I heard Marieke think on the daughter she’d lost and the man she’d loved. They’d been my mother’s slaves, living inside the manor but free to visit Marieke every morning and night. Marieke had waited, wondering why her family didn’t come, a potato and pumpkin stew prepared and going cold. Early the next morning, she saw the smoke and the ruins of the manor.