He fell in love with a sweet island girl. Many boys did, though as guardsmen, they were forbidden from marriage. This girl belonged to Skov Helle, while he’d belonged to Hans Lollik Helle, but she would come once a week to pick up a delivery of fresh rose mallow and lemongrass for Elskerinde Skov’s tea. At first it was the smallest of smiles between them; then conversations that lasted minutes before Malthe could hear his trainer shouting for him. Finally, a kiss. He told her he had fallen in love with her, and she said she had fallen for him, too. Every time they saw each other, even for only the smallest of glances and fast whispers, they built their life together. The plans they had made: Malthe would work in the guard until he found enough coin on the bodies of dead men to buy both his and her freedom. She would tell him of the house she would make for him, the children they would have.
And one day she was gone. Malthe looked forward to seeing her again the next week, as he’d grown accustomed to—even his commander had begun to allow the two a few extra moments whenever she visited, he’d grown so used to seeing this island girl with her sweet smile—but she never came. Malthe waited week after week, but the girl never returned to Lund Helle again. Malthe still didn’t know if she lived or if she’d died; if someone had learned their secret, and wouldn’t let her return; if Elskerinde Skov had simply grown tired of rose-mallow and lemongrass tea.
That was all Malthe needed to realize, finally, that his life wasn’t his own. He’d known before, knew that he was owned by a Fjernman, knew that he would have to die for this man if his master ever commanded it. But now the life he imagined for himself—having a small house on the edge of the plantation, coming home to the sweet island girl who smelled of lemongrass, having a child of his own—everything he’d imagined, he now lost.
I want to ask Malthe why he doesn’t ask about the girl. Gossip flows so easily through these islands, and surely there’s someone who would know of a slave who once made deliveries to Lund Helle, but I realize that he’s thought of this too, of course he has—he simply doesn’t want to know. It’s easier for him that way. He’s already mourned what he lost. If he were to find the girl again, what would he expect of her, and himself, when he can no longer ignore the fact that they don’t own their lives, their freedom? It’s better not knowing where she is, if she still lives.
He’s silent as we walk the path, which is more rock than dirt. That anything grows on this island is a miracle, but the trees prove themselves to be worthy of this feat: thick and gnarled, roots creeping up from the ground. The brush is made of thorns, snagging my dress and my hair and my skin. We walk in the heat, mosquitoes swarming around me, though I don’t see any water where they could have laid their eggs. Sweat trickles down my back, and I’m sore and scratched, the sun reaching its highest point in the sky. I’m about to turn to Malthe, to give up on finding the manor of Valdemar Helle, when I see it.
The manor is a small thing, burned black from fires long ago, its back crumbled to the ground. It stands in a clearing of trees, though a garden takes over the house’s entrance. I walk closer and see that the sugar apple trees still bear their fruit, swollen and falling and rotting on the ground. The windows of the house are open or shattered. It’s easy to see inside, to see that there’s no furniture or paintings that hang on the wall. Cristoff Valdemar was born and grew and lived in this manor, up until the very day he was passed the crown from the former regent; Cristoff had been the rightful heir, even though he was only a distant cousin. The king’s sons had been killed in battle, in an uprising of the Ludjivik. It might’ve been a coincidence that the Ludjivik suddenly received the coin and resources to begin their uprising just at the end of the regent’s era. It might still be a coincidence that Lothar Niklasson is so eager to destroy the Ludjivik name, now that their resources have dwindled.
I examine the house, the crumbled stone. The structure itself is unsafe, but still I walk into the open entryway, all signs of a door itself already gone. Wood-paneled floors sink into the dirt, from which weeds and wildflowers bloom. Remnants of a fireplace hold brush, growing from the earth. It’s difficult to tell what might’ve once been the sitting room, the dining room, the kitchen. I’d hoped there’d be a clue—some piece I could add to the growing puzzle of Hans Lollik Helle, something that would illuminate the answer to all my questions. But there’s nothing here except a broken manor, a ghost of itself, and some overripe fruit that hangs from the trees.
Malthe waits while I walk around to the back of the house. I see two large stones, out of place—walk to them, and read their engravings. The graves of Dagny and Karine Valdemar: Cristoff’s wife and daughter. It’s strange that they’ve been buried here and not out at sea. Burying bodies in the soil is a tradition of the Koninkrijk Empire, who have no access to the ocean to bury their people. It’s possible that the king decided to bury them in the dirt as a devoted Fjern would. Dagny and Karine Valdemar have both been dead years now, taken by the storm-season sickness. There’s another stone beside the grave of Dagny Valdemar, smaller and unmarked. This strikes me as odd, so I call for Malthe. He sees the work that needs to be done and leaves me where I stand. I wait, listening to the birdcalls, the rustling of leaves. I begin to regret being left here alone. It feels as though a pair of eyes watch me—as though there’s a presence nearby, waiting for the moment it can strike. There’s a crunching of stone, but it’s only Malthe returning. He carries a shovel he’d brought from camp. He begins his work without complaint.
I stand and watch him dig. His hands become bloody, his legs and feet crusted with dirt, and still he digs, until the sun begins to set and the sky becomes purple, the wings of fruit bats fluttering across my vision in shadow. He digs, until finally he stops, and I can feel the shock in him, the disgust. I walk to the edge of the grave. I’m not as surprised as I should be.
“Keep digging,” I tell Malthe.
I stand unmoving at the edge of the grave and watch as the pale hand that appears from the dirt becomes connected to an arm, a head with patches of its hair still connected to the skull. The body of Konge Cristoff Valdemar, empty eye sockets decayed, mouth eaten away to show his teeth, skin purple and blue. The gash in his neck is so deep that his head was nearly severed.
“What will you do?” Malthe asks me.
The Ludjivik are not on Valdemar Helle. Guards had scouted the island from one bay to the next, and no spies or Ludjivik soldiers were found, so we move deeper into the groves; ships are hidden behind the island, ready to swerve around and attack once the Ludjivik appear. I wait on a ship that remains motionless in the stagnant water, wind lifeless—rare, especially when we’re so near the end of the storm season. It almost feels as though the spirits have forced their way into the world of the living; the air, heavy with the ghosts of my ancestors, is so unmoving that there isn’t even a breeze. This isn’t helpful for the attack. Though the guards have been trained for land and sea and are used to rowing when necessary, we will be fighting against the tide, making the Ludjivik ships swifter than ours.
The battle begins, and in the distance I can see the movement of ships as the Solberg and Niklasson armies attack. Even so far away, I can see the streams of smoke that rise and hear the screams. We wait—wait so long the sun begins to fall, and bodies of the battle begin to float by; sharks rise, breaking the surface of the water with an explosion of fins before the bodies are ripped apart, pulled down beneath the surface in a tide of red.
Ours proves to be a useful position for the first of the ships that attempt to flee the Solberg army. The Lund guards that waited on the island come from hiding, arrows lit with fire flying. The ships attempt a wider berth, but the Jannik ships block their escape. The Solberg is close enough behind. The fight is brought before me, and I can see the Solberg guards board the Ludjivik ships; see the men cut, screaming, falling into the water and to the sharks below. These men are all dark-skinned, all islanders, all slaves who have no choice but to fight and die for the Fjern who own them. Refusing would mean execu
tion; it’s better to fight now, with the chance that they might live. And so the Fjern pit my people against one another and watch comfortably from their seats while islanders die around them.
The battle isn’t long. The Ludjivik guards are untrained and unmotivated; they fight knowing that they’ll die. Hannes Skov is captured, but he continues to struggle, even in his chains, and so Jytte executes him herself, slicing off the man’s head and placing it into a bag to bring back to the false king Valdemar, to share with him what she hopes will be rewarded with succession to the throne.
I think of the offer the king had given me: to escape with my life and never return to Hans Lollik Helle. It’d be easy to do, to simply get onto one of my ships and order Malthe to take me to the northern empires, Marieke beside me. As she would say, she has nowhere else to go. The Fjern, certainly, wouldn’t miss me. They would rejoice. And for a moment, I do consider that I could simply escape. It would be easy to have the life of peace I’d once daydreamed about with Friedrich at my side, easy to live out the rest of my days without having to worry if I would die. Whoever rules the king knows that I’m close to learning their secrets; they offered me the chance to escape, and I didn’t take it, and so I’m sure that they’ll attempt to kill me. They may well succeed.
Marieke waits for me as I approach the Jannik house. One side of her face is swollen, her eye bruised shut and her lip cut. She twists her hands together, watching with unease as I come to her. Before I can ask what’s happened, she sends her thoughts to me. I sweep past her and into the sitting room, where Aksel waits, sprawled across one of the sofas. There’s no guavaberry rum in sight, but I can still smell the alcohol rising from his clothes, his hair, the pores of his skin.
Aksel had been waiting for me to leave, Marieke thinks; as soon as my ships departed for Valdemar Helle, he returned to his house. He asked for Marieke. He sat where he does now as he made his commands: a grand dinner of roasted goat, though he knew the kitchens didn’t have the supplies. Sugarcane wine, even knowing the Jannik house held no such fineries. Every time Marieke had to apologetically tell him that his commands couldn’t be met, he slapped her. He demanded entertainment: slave girls to dance before him, music to be sung. This, Marieke shakenly helped in—two girls from the kitchens, embarrassed and trying not to cry. The slaves who had gathered to sing were not even finished with their song when Aksel grabbed the girl Agatha and tried to drag her from the room, pulling at her dress. She screamed. Marieke stepped forward quickly. She pleaded with Aksel. He hit her, but she wouldn’t stop, speaking in a low and rational tone—the girl is too young, and she isn’t a slave of Jannik Helle but of Hans Lollik Helle, what will he do if she bears a child? She followed them all the way to the bedroom, and wouldn’t stop asking her questions even when he slammed the door in her face. He grew so tired that he had barely taken off his shoes before he swung the door open again and kneed Marieke in the gut—but, spirits remain, he had left the room with the crying girl inside.
This was only hours before. I stand before him now.
“I haven’t seen you in some time,” I tell Aksel, but he ignores me, eyes closed and hand resting on his head, as though this world is too difficult for him to bear. “Have you been with Erik Nørup?”
“You don’t have the authority to question me,” he murmurs, thinking to me that he’s not his brother, not one of my little pets of whom I can demand answers and make commands.
“You’re needed at the king’s meetings,” I tell him. “You’re needed as head of the Jannik house. If you won’t do either of those things—if you won’t fulfill your duties as Herre Jannik—then you might as well leave Hans Lollik Helle.”
“So that you can take full control of the Jannik household?” he asks me, laughing with his eyes still closed.
“You don’t even want to be here, Aksel,” I say. I try to control the fury in me. Marieke’s memory of Aksel’s hand knocking into her cheek, her nose, her lip—I want to wrap my hands around his neck as I had his mother’s, wrap them and hold them there until he draws his last breath; but I know I can’t. The kongelig would take the opportunity to have me hanged. “Leave Hans Lollik Helle.”
“An islander, a slave, taking control of the family name. My father would drown himself before he saw the day.”
Yes, Engel Jannik wouldn’t have been able to stomach the sight of me, standing in his house, in my dress of white, making my commands as though I’m a part of the kongelig and deserve respect. But Aksel is wrong; Engel wouldn’t have killed himself. He would’ve cut me open with a machete instead. The man had always been violent, hateful, beating anyone who happened to be near. Aksel had often been a victim of being near Engel Jannik. His father was drunk almost every day, angry at the debts he’d caused his family. Engel asked, once, why the boy was a failure in everything he attempted, and Aksel dared to respond that he was, after all, Engel Jannik’s son. The fist came before Aksel could register it, and the fist wouldn’t stop coming until Freja Jannik came screaming, begging her husband to stop, that he would kill the boy. Aksel was sure that this is what Engel had wanted. Aksel wasn’t the only person he beat. He’d beaten Freja Jannik many nights, so many nights that Aksel would fall asleep listening to her scream.
He didn’t mourn his father when the man died. Freja Jannik, though she organized the man’s ceremony, his body lit on fire upon his boat and sent to the sea, didn’t cry for him either. Aksel didn’t ask how Engel Jannik could have died of the storm-season sickness, when the man had never been sick before in his entire life, as far as Aksel could remember. He didn’t ask his mother why, when he reached for a particular glass of lemongrass tea, she told him not to drink it—that the tea wasn’t for him, but for his father. Freja Jannik made the man a cup of lemongrass tea every morning for three months as Engel Jannik became frailer, until finally he succumbed to his illness.
Aksel had worked so hard to not become his father. His father had hit and hurt Freja Jannik, and Aksel would never have hurt Beata in such a way. He would only have shown her and their children kindness and love. He would’ve praised Beata Larsen as though she was one of the Fjern gods. He would’ve brought her flowers and sugarcane wine, refusing to leave her side, not even for the politics of Hans Lollik Helle. Aksel had been ready to prove that he was nothing like Engel Jannik. And for all of his patience and understanding, Aksel is now alone in this place, trapped here with me.
“I won’t leave Hans Lollik Helle,” Aksel tells me. “I want to be here when you die. I want to watch.”
“And how do you know you won’t be killed before me?”
“I don’t,” he says. “It’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Another storm comes, but this one is quick, winds rattling the windows and tree branches for just a morning, sun shining through the blackened clouds before it moves on. The end of the storm season is near, in just two weeks’ time, and the false king will be announcing his choice among the kongelig soon, assuming that the remaining kongelig are still alive. I’m no closer to knowing the truth about Konge Valdemar—who controls him, who has tried to kill me, and who has already killed Beata Larsen and Olsen Årud, Herre Jens Nørup, and Dame Ane Solberg. The other kongelig assume that there’s no longer any threat. They believe Gustav Ludjivik sent in his assassins and that Hannes Skov had meant to finish killing the rest of us—that the murders are a thing of the past. At the kongelig meetings with their updates, and at the garden parties with their laughter and wine, their focus remains on who will be chosen to succeed Konge Valdemar and win the regent’s rule.
A messenger brings a request: Konge Valdemar has asked for my company as he watches the passing of the whales. It’ll likely be the last passing of the season, and it’s generally considered a great honor to be invited by the king. The message reads that this watching of the whales will be in celebration of the defeat of the Ludjivik.
Not all of the kongelig have been invited. Aksel had been invited to
attend alongside me, but he’s disappeared once again. There isn’t any way I can control him, and now that there isn’t any way that I can win the crown, this isn’t my concern, either. There are larger games at play than Aksel’s comings and goings. Lothar Niklasson and Jytte Solberg, for their victory over the Ludjivik, are in attendance as well. I’m surprised to see that Erik Nørup is also here. He didn’t have much to do with the quelling of the uprising, and everyone knows that he’s useless compared to his sister, who isn’t even on this boat. Still, it’s not my place to question. Everyone lines up on the sand by the mangroves, hands folded politely above our laps, no one looking at one another or speaking. We’re dressed in our finery—our lace and silks and cotton trousers.
A boat arrives to bring us to the ship, one by one. It’s only as I’m on the boat, waves swelling beneath me, that I feel a spark of fear. It would be easy for any of the kongelig not invited to this venture to have most of us killed, blaming our deaths on an accident: The ship we’re on could knock into an unseen coral reef and sink, drowning everyone aboard. A fire could be set, forcing us all overboard and sending us to the sharks. But when I arrive on the ship itself—smaller than the warships, barely any larger than a fisherman’s boat—none of the other kongelig appear worried. Jytte Solberg stands at the railing, peering not at the sea but at the rest of us, her eyes landing on me, her hate swelling with the tide. Lothar Niklasson speaks to her softly as he holds a glass of sugarcane wine, speaking of memories he’s had of Jytte’s parents, now passed. But even Lothar barely listens to the words that politely stream from his mouth. He wonders only why the king isn’t here.
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