Queen of the Conquered

by Kacen Callender

  Erik comes to me. He’s already had a glass of sugarcane wine and has begun another. His face turns red in the heat, and he has a wide smile. He’s embarrassed; he can feel that his sister has already told me that he admires me—not romantically, of course not, he would never have any romantic love for someone with skin as dark as mine, for he’s been taught that there’s nothing beautiful in my skin and he’s been too foolish to realize that he’s wrong, too ignorant to carefully look at the depth of the darkness that covers me, the hues of purple and blue, as deep as night; but he is curious. He’s considered me entertainment from the very start of the storm season, someone who is much more interesting to watch and listen to than the older kongelig around him. He has no respect for me. He only finds me amusing.

  “I’ve heard that Aksel isn’t well,” he tells me. “Is it true that he left for Jannik Helle?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I say, without care of the implication, that I don’t know the whereabouts of my own husband. Any other number of the kongelig might have been offended, but Erik only smiles.

  “Do you see me in the same way that you see the other kongelig?” Erik asks me, lowering his voice. I can feel here that he wants me to use my kraft on him. He wants me to know his thoughts, feel his emotions, even take control of his body. It’s curiosity, for Erik, always curiosity; his sister has always been curious too. She has always wanted to learn as much as she could, reading her texts and studying her sciences, doing her experiments on herbs and blood; but for Erik, his curiosity appeared in other ways. His was a curiosity for life. Curiosity for others: for their bodies, for their lives. He longed to know the stories of the people around him. Longed to know their motivations, their desires. Erik is like his sister: He envies my kraft as well. But Erik isn’t like Alida in one way. She tries to convince herself that she doesn’t mind that I have such a kraft with power over her and all the other kongelig. Erik does mind. He finds it unfair, that he should have a kraft that only allows him to know his sister’s thoughts, when I should have a kraft that allows me to know all the people of the world, anyone of my liking. I don’t deserve such a kraft. Erik has been taught that my skin makes me less intelligent than the Fjern, so he thinks such an ability is wasted on me.

  Gods, what he could do with this kraft of mine: learn the secrets of all those around him, learn of their desires so that he can fulfill them. Erik doesn’t believe in forcing the loyalty of others. He believes in inspiring such a love in followers that they would die for him. I realize that I’ve been too quick to dismiss Erik Nørup, believing his love of drink and hatred for the kongelig meetings meant that he had no ambition. Erik is ambitious, yes; he simply knows that he doesn’t have to work as hard as everyone else for the power he holds. Even if he doesn’t become regent, the Nørup family will remain strong among the kongelig. He, like Lothar Niklasson and Cristoff Valdemar before him, recognizes that he owns this world. It was handed to him since the moment he was conceived.

  “I do think you’re similar to the other kongelig, yes,” I tell him. There’s a slip of disappointment from him. He wants to be seen as different from the rest.

  “I’m sorry for the ways you’ve been treated on Hans Lollik Helle, Elskerinde Jannik,” Erik tells me. Surprising, because I can feel from him that this is genuine. “You’re a kongelig, even if you’re an islander; you deserve a certain level of respect, yet none show it. I think you’re brave,” he says.

  I don’t answer him. Even though I can feel the sincerity in his words, I can’t help but think that Erik is only mocking me. I don’t like to admit it, but it can be easy to trick my kraft. Easy for anyone to show me their disingenuous thoughts and feelings. He takes another glass of sugarcane wine, offered by a passing slave.

  The kongelig wonder about the whereabouts of the king, and the longer we stand, the more I begin to worry, until my worry turns to fear. An assassin might be lying in wait, ready to kill us all. The kongelig who has murdered Beata and Olsen might even be here now, ready to slaughter us with a smile.

  There’s a disturbance in the water, and I see them—only a little ways away, close enough that I could jump into the water and swim to the whales and touch them. They turn gracefully in the water, tails breaking the surface and smacking the waves. There are three of them, one a calf. Their skin is covered with barnacles and algae, and as they come closer, the smell of salt becomes stronger. They turn so slowly, so gracefully, that it’s clear they don’t mean any harm. They won’t attack, but they’re so large that my heart begins to pump with fear. It would be easy for them to kill us—to crush us beneath their weight. They don’t eat humans, I know this, and yet they could swallow us whole. This is the first time I’ve seen whales with my own eyes, but the other kongelig have each seen the passing of the whales since the time they were children.

  The king never comes. An assassin doesn’t attack, and a fire isn’t lit. The whales pass us by, and we each return to the boat, to be taken ashore once more.

  Patrika Årud accepts my request to visit for lemongrass tea. She grows paler with each passing day, and her hair seems thinner, the makeup she always pasted on now melting in the heat, showing the pockmarked skin she hides beneath. I have no love for Patrika Årud, and I never will, but I can acknowledge the pain she feels, the hollowness that’s begun to fill her. I’ve lost loved ones before, so I understand the questions she begins to ask herself: whether there’s any point in her staying here on Hans Lollik Helle, or even on any of these islands. How she can possibly continue to live her life when nothing is the same as it had been before.

  Since the fire that burned her manor to the ground, she’s moved into one of the empty houses, hidden even deeper in the groves. Slaves work around us, fixing the gardens and sweeping the dirt out of the sitting room and whipping the dust out of the curtains and rugs while we sit in the shade on her patio. She’s lost all of her belongings on Hans Lollik Helle in the fire and has had to borrow dresses from others of the kongelig while one of her slaves fetches her things from Årud Helle.

  Her hatred, through everything, remains. She can’t even look at me. She believes I’ve come to laugh at her. She sweats in her dress of white, heavy with lace, and clutches the steaming teacup, smelling the lemongrass. Lemongrass had always been her favorite scent. Its rich sweetness reminds her of the few months she would spend on Årud Helle each year. She’d lived in the north with her mother, a woman who had wealth but wouldn’t say how she’d come to so much coin, when she’d been born in the gutters like everyone else around her. The other little girls would laugh at Patrika. They would say she was the daughter of a whore and that she would grow up to be a whore as well.

  Once every year, on Patrika’s birthday, a man with hair as red as her own would come to say hello. He would give her a gift of unimaginable wealth: a necklace of gold, a ring with a ruby in its center. He would ask her how she was and whether she was keeping up with her studies, and she would always say that she was well and that she was doing her best. And then the man would disappear, forgotten until the next year.

  It was when Patrika turned eleven years of age that her mother learned that this man was dead. He was married, but the woman had never given him any children, so Patrika inherited an island in the center of paradise. It had been unimaginable: The child of a woman who worked the brothels, scrounging for scraps, was suddenly a princess. Her mother would bring Patrika to Årud Helle so that the child could look upon all the riches that were now hers, but her mother didn’t love the islands. She claimed that she didn’t want Patrika to forget where she’d come from, but even as a child, Patrika could see the truth plainly: The woman was simple, afraid to live a life different from the only one she had ever known. The islands and their savages scared her, as did the bloodthirsty Fjern, who would take any opportunity they could to seize more wealth and power. She and Patrika lived in the north, struggling for coin, knowing all the while that Patrika owned an entire island, a manor, and all its riches. Patrika’s moth
er allowed Årud Helle to crumble with no Elskerinde. It became an island for bandits, an island where slaves attempting to escape would hide in the groves before moving on.

  Patrika came of age the same year her mother passed. She had nothing in the north, so she traveled the seas. She arrived at Årud Helle, a desolate and abandoned island, one for smugglers and pirates and heathens, and there she felt her ambition grow. She had been deliberate in her decision to marry Olsen Damgaard of Koninkrijk; had been deliberate in keeping her surname of Årud, to match the island she now owned, though it was unheard of for a woman to keep her own last name in marriage.

  “I hope you’re not using your kraft on me, Elskerinde Rose,” she tells me. It’s deliberate of her now, too, to call me by my mother’s name.

  “I was,” I admit. “It can be difficult to keep my boundaries sometimes. Another’s thoughts become my own, and I forget myself.”

  “Is it so difficult?” she asks. “Thankfully for you, I can keep my abilities to myself.”

  A threat, maybe—at least, it’s what Patrika hopes it will be, but even she doesn’t feel the force behind her words. She wants to know why I’m here, why I’ve asked to sip lemongrass tea on her porch. I hesitate to tell her my reasons. I know it’s desperation that has sent me here. Someone who knows the pain I feel might better understand the possibility of a truth like the one I’ve come to tell her. The hopelessness in her, the ambition that died along with her husband, might make her more willing to hear what I have to say, whereas anyone else on the island might only think I’ve come to fill their mind with lies. Patrika isn’t an ally I would ever have love for, but I don’t need an ally whom I love. I need an ally who might listen.

  “The king is dead,” I tell her.

  Patrika drinks some of her tea. I’d always thought it was universally agreed that it was too hot to drink tea on these islands, but Patrika doesn’t seem to mind the heat, even as she sweats. She swallows, and holds the teacup in her lap.

  I continue. “I went to Valdemar Helle to help in the defeat of the Ludjivik, yes, but I also wanted an opportunity to search for clues. The king has been strange,” I tell her, and with this she can agree. All on the island have witnessed the ways Konge Valdemar has changed, seemingly with no logic behind his sudden transformation. Patrika had attributed it all to Valdemar’s old age. She believes the man has lost his mind.

  “My kraft allows me to feel the emotions in others, to control them if I wish. Konge Valdemar has no being to control, no feelings or life to command.”

  She narrows her eyes. She doesn’t believe me. I didn’t think she would, not so easily.

  “I saw the man’s grave on Valdemar Helle,” I tell her. “His body had a neck wound. He’d been killed.”

  “And you believe he was killed by one of the kongelig on this island?” she asks me.

  “Yes,” I tell her. “I know that it wasn’t you. You wouldn’t have killed the king, just to then murder your husband. With Herre Årud’s death—” and I feel a sting of pain here, a shock on my hand that makes me drop my tea. The teacup breaks, large pieces of porcelain falling apart and smaller splinters flying. It’d been purposeful, Patrika’s kraft.

  “Don’t speak of my husband,” she tells me.

  I swallow, rubbing my hand, and nod. “I don’t believe that it was you. I don’t know who else of the kongelig I can trust with the truth.”

  Alida, though she shows me her smiles, could just as easily have been behind the king’s death as her brother; the two could plot together, her brother distracting all with his drunken charm, both pretending they have no interest in the crown so that eyes won’t fall on them. Jytte Solberg’s ambition is clear; she fights for the king’s approval, but it’s possible that this is an act to pretend her innocence while she kills all of the kongelig to secure her throne. Lothar Niklasson I trust least of all. The man’s kraft over truth and his position as the king’s closest adviser make him the most likely to hold the king’s strings, a puppet who speaks and does as he commands. Each of the kongelig, knowing my kraft, could work to hide their thoughts and emotions.

  I never imagined I would find myself coming to Patrika Årud with the truth, with the hopes that she might agree to make herself my ally and use her resources to uncover the kongelig who means to kill us all. She’s surprised as well. She doesn’t believe me—she thinks this is a trick I mean to play on her, a cruel and elaborate game to laugh at her mourning. She thinks on the slave I keep, that boy who she believes is my pet. She worries he has told me of the nights Olsen would bring Løren to Patrika—lock the boy in the room so she could use him as she wished.

  “Where’s your proof?” she asks me.

  “Still on Valdemar Helle,” I answer. “I had my slave cover the body again, in case the murderer returns and sees that we know the truth.”

  “And if the king is dead,” she says, “who is it that we see in the council meetings and garden parties?”

  I don’t have the answer for her, because I don’t know. It could be his ghost. His ghost, controlled by a kongelig; his ghost, returned to the world of the living to find his vengeance.

  “Even if this is the truth you tell,” Patrika says, “why would I help you?”

  I can feel in her the disinterest she has in these islands. This mystery of the king feels like a faraway dream to her now. She stays here on this island because it’s her duty, but she has already decided to return to the north and relinquish her position among the kongelig. It’s the right choice for her now, allowing her to move on from the death of her husband, but disappointment crawls through me. It occurs to her, briefly, that I might be seeing her thoughts, her emotions, but she simply doesn’t care—her husband is dead, her grasp on the throne lost, and nothing matters to her, not right now.

  Patrika tells me she had respect for my mother. I think that she means to say this to hurt me, and she does, this mention of my mother; but she means what she says as well. “I hated her,” she acknowledges, “this woman with her black skin, just as black as yours, thinking that she was our equal and looking each of us in the eye with her defiance. I was disgusted to be in her presence,” Patrika tells me. “But still, I had respect for her. I have respect for such a woman who finds herself in situations as she did—surrounded by people she knew held no love for her, wanted to see her fail, wanted to see her dead—and still holds pride for herself.” Patrika thinks of her own childhood: the girls, surrounding her, pulling at her hair and her dress, telling her that she was the daughter of a whore. “It becomes easy to think, after all, that they might be right.”

  Marieke scrubs my back and plaits my hair. I know she wants me to leave Hans Lollik Helle. This switch in her is surprising to me, but Aksel’s attack has shaken her. Though the swelling on her face has gone down, the cut on her lip scabbed over, she’s still unsettled from the beating she received. She wants her revenge against the kongelig, yes, revenge for the deaths of her daughter and the girl’s father, revenge even for my mother and sisters and brother, revenge for all our people who have been massacred and tortured and enslaved; but she doesn’t believe there’s any vengeance to be had on this island. Not for her, not for me, not for our people—not now, not for this storm season. She thinks this is a battle that we’ve lost, and Marieke has always been patient. She thinks another battle will come again. There will be another chance. Maybe in one year, maybe in ten years, maybe long after we’re both dead and in the ground—but there will be another chance for us to find our revenge.

  “It’s important to know when to surrender,” she whispers to me. “Surrender, and keep your life while you still have it.”

  But if I were to leave Hans Lollik Helle, I would be consumed by this anger inside of me. Consumed, knowing that justice still hasn’t been served. Knowing that I failed to take the throne from the Fjern as I’d promised my mother I would.

  When I sleep, I’m in the halls of the king’s manor. The wallpaper rots and boils in fire as I run, roots of
the maze wrapping around my ankles. I tell myself that this is a dream, that it’s just another nightmare of Hans Lollik Helle, but even as I tell myself this, I don’t wake. I fall, and dirt buries me. I can’t breathe—I choke on the dirt that fills my nose, my mouth, my throat and lungs. It’s dark, and I can’t see, but I can feel the body I’m trapped in the dirt with—can feel the squirming of its maggots, the blood leaking from its neck.

  I open my eyes, sweating in the yellow sun that fills my room. The king, his neck leaking blood, stands before me. By the time I’ve sat up, he’s already gone, curtains shifting in the breeze. I can’t stay inside this house. I can hear Aksel yelling at the slave girl, can hear the chatter rising from the kitchens. I slip out of bed and wander down the hall, shadowed in the afternoon breeze, and down the stairs. I slip, almost fall—and see that I’ve stepped in blood. It pools from the floorboards, leaks from the walls. I close my eyes and take a breath, waiting to wake, but I don’t—the blood rises like the sea around me, rising to my knees. I run from the house. The slaves have all disappeared, the sound of the wind following me, and I can feel that something or someone chases me, though I can’t see who or what—I race into the groves, and bodies hang from the branches, ropes tied around their necks, eyes bulging and mouths trapped open in silent screams—

  I gasp, sitting up. I’m still in the groves, but I’m on the grass, yellow sunlight shining through the trees, which are empty of bodies. I stand slowly, my limbs sore as though I really had run from my chambers, through the halls, and down the dirt path. Memory comes back to me now: leaving my room for a walk, deciding to sit and enjoy the afternoon sun. I had thought about my brother, Claus; my sisters, Ellinor and Inga. I had thought about my mother. I wondered what each would do if they found themselves in the position I do now. Whether they would decide to stay on this island and fight to outlive all the rest of the kongelig. I know that Ellinor would stay, but only because she would want the approval of the kongelig. I loved my sister, but her memory reminds me of our father: eager to kiss the feet of the Fjern, who kicked him in the mouth. Inga wouldn’t have stayed. This island would be too bloody for her, and like Beata Larsen, she would have attempted to leave at the first chance she had. Only Claus, perhaps, would’ve stayed on this island; but he was always sick, frail. He wouldn’t have lived long, even if he’d survived our family’s massacre. Claus always knew this, I think, knew that he would die young. Perhaps this is why he was always forthright with the truth. There was no time for lies. My mother, I already know, would have stayed—stayed on the island, just as I do now. Is this why I was the only one out of my sisters and brother to live?