“It’s too late to admonish ourselves,” Marieke says. “There’s no point in thinking of what we’ve done wrong, and what we should have done differently. We have a chance to right ourselves. The battle of Årud Helle.”
I understand what she wants me to do without her saying the words aloud. We must win the battle against the Fjern, yes—must protect our people and the island, must keep the kongelig from taking control of the north. But this time, once we’ve won the battle, I can’t show Sigourney Rose mercy. We can’t allow her to live. Not any longer. It pains Marieke to admit this. It hurts a part of me, too. Not because I have any love for Sigourney, but because I must admit that I was wrong. I was wrong to continue showing her mercy, wrong to think that she would see the truth and join us as an islander, wrong to hope that she would use her power to free her people. She has done none of that, and must witness the consequences unfold.
Marieke has one last hope for Sigourney. “Don’t let Malthe kill her,” she says. “He’ll draw it out, make her feel pain. Kill her yourself. Make it quick. That’s the one last mercy we can show her.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I stand at the helm of a ship that leads us north to Årud Helle. Four ships are situated behind. Malthe leads two ships and Geir the other two to flank the eastern and western ends of the island. Scouts have already sent word that the ships led by Sigourney Rose—ten ships in all—are approaching from the western end of the island. She will likely not hesitate to begin attacks on the people. Guards have been sent ahead of us, to warn the islanders and evacuate them north to Ludjivik Helle, but I worry there won’t be enough time before the battle begins. There is no specific location, no field where we must meet. All of Årud Helle is to be the arena.
“Are you sure we should do this?” Kjerstin asks beside me. “We could focus on evacuating the people.”
“We can’t lose Årud Helle,” I say. “Not to the kongelig. Not to Sigourney Rose.”
Kjerstin wonders for a moment if my decision-making has been taken over by emotion, by an anger I have for the woman and a desire for revenge. She wouldn’t be wholly wrong. But more than anything else, I feel a need to punish myself. This is my punishment. Doing what I’d hesitated to and righting my wrongs in trusting Sigourney.
“As long as innocent lives won’t be sacrificed unnecessarily,” she says, thinking of the guards who will be thrown into this battle. Some have already decided that we will lose. Sigourney comes with enough ships and guards to defeat all of the northern islands. We have half of her weapons, half of her supplies, and half of her men. There’s potential for this to be a massacre. When word initially came of the number of ships and guards the Fjern had sent, there was an uproar among the guards. They were angry that we would send them to die. But I reminded them of the battle of Hans Lollik Helle—reminded them how, each time we’ve been outnumbered, we have found a way to win. We don’t lose to the Fjern because we have more at stake than them. The battle of Årud Helle, I declared, would be no different.
Boats carrying islanders have begun to leave the bay, passing us on the waves, people looking up at us as they pass. A line of smoke wafts into the air from the beach. The signal that more than half of the islanders have been evacuated. Guards on the island will continue to evacuate and protect those that haven’t been reached yet, but we can’t wait and give Sigourney the chance to gain ground. The sails unfurl and the wind sweeps us closer to the shallows. Boats are lowered and we row to shore, past the gnarled coral that scratches the bottom of the wood. Men climb over the sides of the boats to pull us the rest of the way, onto the sand. The ships led by Malthe and Geir do the same along the curve of the beach. Our voices echo. There’s no point in staying quiet. Sigourney knows that we’re here as well.
We march forward. There’re few places to hide on this island. A line of coconut groves block perfect vision, but there are still villages in the distance, empty of the islanders who had taken the homes from the Fjern. Kjerstin marches alongside me. She wouldn’t listen to the insistence that she stay on the ship for her own safety. She doesn’t care that she hasn’t been trained as a guard.
“If my scouts are here, then I will be, too.”
We reach the first of the villages. Most of Årud Helle relied on fishing, with villages along the bay and the sea with docks. Looking at his maps, Geir told us that this would be one of the few inland villages, which could be used as a good checkpoint and base for our second wave of guards as the first pushes on to meet Sigourney. The village itself is eerie. Though it should be empty only because guards had been sent to evacuate the people here, I smell death. Kjerstin is tense beside me as well. There’s a thin line of smoke from a stove with a fire that still burns, and penned chickens peck at the ground, goats chew on dry grass. As I walk forward, I see a hand lying on the ground. The hand is connected to the body of a dead girl, resting on her back, her eyes stuck open in fear. I turn the corner, and bodies of islanders are spread across the dirt. The five guards sent to warn them are dead, their heads placed in a line for display. I’m barely able to shout a warning when the first arrow flies. The arrows thud as they sink into flesh and bone, shouts and screams filling the air. An arrow aimed for my neck scratches my skin. I clasp a hand over the cut and throw myself at Kjerstin, both of us falling hard to the ground as arrows fly around us. We’re still in the dirt when shouts rise, and Fjern guards run from the houses of the village, machetes raised. I kick at one that comes for me, and as he stumbles back I snatch an arrow lying in the chest of a dead guard and thrust it into the man’s stomach. I spin and cut the chest of a Fjern. All around me is the chaos of battle.
A Fjern is on top of Kjerstin, a knife at her throat. She pushes the man off, and when he falls, a dagger is in his side. She follows, yanking the dagger from his skin and puncturing his throat. She smirks at me before her eyes widen. It’s the only warning I need to turn, machete out, to cut my blade halfway through a Fjern’s neck. It’s lodged in bone and is difficult to yank out. A Fjern yells as he runs at me, blade high above his head. Kjerstin throws herself at him, the machete narrowly missing my shoulder. I abandon my machete to follow, the memory of the night I’d found Kjerstin on the bay with a wound in her side fresh in my mind. By the time I’ve reached them, the man coughs blood that sprays across Kjerstin’s face.
She falls back, breathing heavy. The groans of the dying surround us, the last pleas for mercy as our guards cut the remaining Fjernmen’s necks. About twenty of us remain. We lost guards, but not too many to continue—not so many that we have to give up hope yet. Ten guards are to stay behind, as planned, to keep hold of the village in case we lose our battles and Sigourney is able to continue pushing forward. I try not to think of what it would mean for us to have lost our battles—that I and Kjerstin and all the men around us who march forward would be dead. I wonder about Geir and Malthe—hope that, if they’ve encountered ambushes, they’ve also survived. We’ll depend on them once the battle with Sigourney begins, just as they depend on us. If neither has made it through, then we’ll have already lost.
The thin forest of coconut and palm trees offer little shade from the harsh sun. Only sharp shadows sway back and forth across the gray dirt, mixed with the sand of the bay. The trees here are brittle and dying, and the coconuts that have fallen are rotten, untouched by any bird or lizard that might’ve found the seeds. The entire island might have once belonged to a mangrove forest. Those trees are dead and gone, but I can still see where the tides may rise on nights when the moon is full, polluting the soil with its salt. Through the thin trees, I see movement. I hear hushed voices. There’s a whisper behind us, then to the side. I put out a hand to halt Kjerstin and the others. The whispers stop, but I can see the Fjern half hidden behind the trees. They realize we’ve seen them. They step forward, machetes drawn.
One man, taller and thinner than all the rest, eyes me. “We’re in luck,” he announces to his men. “I believe we’ve found Løren Jannik.”
&nb
sp; I see it clearly, how he believes he will be rewarded favorably for finding me and capturing me, tying me up and bringing me to the Fjern, not to Sigourney Rose—he tries not to think of the insult of an islander commanding him and the other guards when they should be commanded by someone with skin as pale as theirs. But he would take me and gift me to Lothar Niklasson himself. He hopes for a promotion and special treatment. He thinks that if I fight and if he’s forced to kill me, he’ll simply deliver my head to Herre Niklasson instead.
We’re evenly matched. They walk to us, enclosing us in a circle. Kraft stirs inside of me. On my order, we run at each of them with shouts. There’s a clang of blade against blade, grunts and yells of pain, the slice of flesh and fresh blood in the air. I lose myself. I could close my eyes, and I would see my body from the eyes of the Fjern who surround us. I can see the way I swing and turn, the way I cut down one Fjern and the next like a vengeful spirit released on this world. I don’t stop until each of the men are dead, and I’ve taken the commander’s head.
When the fighting is done, I’m met with silence. Kjerstin stares at me openly. This isn’t the first that my people have seen me fight this way. The fear mingles with respect, and in this instant, relief. We’re all still alive.
It’s when we leave the thin forest of trees that we see Geir and the men he’s led to these woods. A quick scan lets me see that Geir hasn’t lost a single guard, though he relays a similar ambush that had caught them as they passed a fishing village on the coast. His kraft for strategy made it an easy fight.
“And Malthe?” he asks.
“We haven’t seen him.”
“He might be in the thick of battle,” he says. “What do you want to do? Shall we wait for him, or should we push forward?”
“Isn’t it odd, Løren,” Kjerstin says, “that we haven’t yet seen any sign of Sigourney Rose?”
“It’s possible that she waits on her ship while she’s sent the guards in to do her work,” Geir suggests.
I wish I had thought to question any of the guards we had killed, though there wouldn’t have been much opportunity to do so with their blades at our necks. There isn’t any way to be certain, but I don’t believe Sigourney would have stayed behind.
“She has something to prove to Herre Niklasson. She would want him to hear how she led her guards into victory against us.”
“If we do manage to capture her, I hope you’ll give me the pleasure of kicking the chair out from under her,” Kjerstin says. She means this blithely, but the words feel harsh. I understand now that I can’t show Sigourney mercy. She needs to die. But it isn’t a laughing matter to me. Kjerstin can see this, but she doesn’t care. She thinks I should’ve killed Sigourney Rose long ago, and she’s right.
“We’re wasting time,” Geir says. “We need to find Malthe and his men and see where Sigourney hides.”
We begin to march, nearly sixty of us in all. There isn’t any way to hide from anyone who might be watching, so we don’t bother to try. We move through the fields of dry and brown grass, dirt beneath our shoes at times like dried clay, peeling under the hot sun, and at other times moist with saltwater that has leaked in from the sea. We come to a saltwater stream. A body floats down the river—an islander, not one of the guards but a villager who had lived here before the battle. As we watch the body pass, Kjerstin whispers a prayer. But another body comes, and more, until the stream is filled with corpses. Geir puts a hand over his nose and mouth. He thinks he might be sick.
“Fjern bastards,” Kjerstin says. “All of them.” The pain sparks an anger that becomes a fire tearing through her. She’s tired. Tired of seeing her people slaughtered like animals, abused like they are not beings deserving of the respect of life. She wants to make the Fjern feel as she does. She wants to see their bodies stretched across all the islands and the sea.
I wish that we could stop to pay our respects, but this can only mean that the villages to the west, where Malthe was meant to send them to the coast, has been taken by Sigourney. I assumed she would split her guards as we did, coming to the center of the island herself with her more powerful forces, but she isn’t here, and this is a sign that she has taken all of her guards to skirt around the coast instead. She might have guessed at our strategy and means to kill Malthe and his guards first, cutting down on our number and making it difficult for us to fight back. Kjerstin and Geir see the error we’ve made as well.
We move west, where the land becomes uneven with rock and stone, paths that slope up hills and then fall sharply. This was planned by Sigourney as well. This is difficult terrain to enter, and she will be waiting here for us. She already has the upper hand. The fear in me steadily grows, but we have to continue.
Kjerstin wonders if we should surrender. We’ve saved as many of the islanders as we could. We should leave while we still have our lives—regroup, even if it means abandoning Malthe and his men. We have the guards from the northern empires, with more promised on the way. If we lose this fight, we’ll be halving our numbers. She wants to say it. She wants to suggest that we retreat. But she suspects that I’m already in her head, reading her thoughts, and from the way I meet her eye, she has her confirmation. She sees that I won’t surrender, so she saves her breath for the climb through the rocky path.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
At the top of a hill we climb is a plateau. The wind whips over the field of dry grass. I can see the slope of a valley, leading to the bay, where Malthe’s ship is out at sea. But there is no sign of the guards—no sign of Malthe, either. Kjerstin meets my eye with confusion. My heart pumps in my chest. Something isn’t right. We came prepared for battle, only to be met by ghosts.
Geir looks about nervously. “We should go,” he says. “Return to the east and wait to hear word on where Sigourney Rose is on this island.”
I’m about to agree when I hear a clattering. Across the field, climbing up the valley, are Fjern guardsmen. Line after line, they march. Forty, fifty, sixty, seventy of them—and still they come. They overwhelm our numbers. And in front of them all is the woman with dark skin who wears the white of the kongelig. She walks like she’s both a prisoner and a queen. The men she commands stop behind her, but she continues forward. I understand what she asks of me. I walk to meet her.
She stops midway, waiting for me to close the distance. I hold my kraft’s wall between us carefully. If she manages to slip through the smallest crack, she could take control of my body and have me cut my own neck. She watches me intently.
“You don’t have to protect yourself from me,” she says. “Take the wall down. I won’t attack you. It isn’t proper etiquette.”
“I’d rather not take my chances.”
“You’ll exhaust yourself before the battle begins,” Sigourney says. She eyes me, and I give myself a moment to take her in as well.
This is the first I’m seeing Sigourney in person in almost a month. She looks different from the version I’d seen through our kraft. She’s thinner. She looks older, too. Marieke had seen a storm in my eyes. I’d been disillusioned. I can see the same effect in Sigourney. Though we’d never been children, had never been allowed the childhoods of the Fjern, we still had an innocence and a naïveté of ourselves and what we expected of others. That’s different. Sigourney believed that she could someday be loved and accepted by her people as she sat on a throne of our bones. She realizes now how she never will be. She thought she would force the respect of the Fjern—of Lothar Niklasson and Jytte Solberg and Aksel. She knows they will never respect her. The truth creates a dim coldness in her eyes. She’d killed before, ordered executions and whippings while telling herself she simply had no choice. She realizes that she’d wanted to before. There isn’t any point in hiding her own cruelty from herself, no point in hiding it from others—especially when they’re her enemies. She looks at me, and she sees her enemy.
“You’re different, Løren,” she tells me. “You’ve changed.”
She can see how I’ve tried to e
mbrace the same coldness. She can see how I’ve failed. It’s only out of necessity that I think I must kill her.
“I’ll give you a chance to surrender,” she says. “Allow me to bring you to Lothar Niklasson, and I’ll let all of your guards go.”
“Where is Malthe and his men?” I ask her.
Sigourney gives me the sliver of a smile. “He didn’t leave his ship.”
She speaks the truth. Fury beats through me. Malthe didn’t attack. He meant to abandon me and Kjerstin and Geir and all the rest of us to this island, knowing we would need him and his forces to have any chance of winning. This was his plan. He doesn’t want me to leave this island alive.
“You should know better than to trust someone like Malthe,” Sigourney says.
“As I should’ve known better than to trust you.”
She shakes her head. “The option I offered you might have saved your life,” she says. “Had you surrendered—”
“You made the suggestion knowing it wasn’t an option.”
My words upset her. “That,” she says, “is precisely why you’ve already lost this war. You’re beholden to this idea you have of yourself, Løren. You think of only being the good person, the one who is not the villain in this story, without realizing that wanting so desperately to do what’s right is just as selfish. You don’t do what’s right for the islands or for your people. You do what’s right for yourself. Because you want to feel good about the moral path you take and your actions, whether they’re the right choice or not. It’s why you will lose this war.”
King of the Rising Page 30
