PROLOGUE
They chased me through the groves. My heart pumped, fear slowing the blood in my legs. Air caught in my throat. Sharp stones cut the undersides of my feet as branches and brush and thorns ripped into my legs and arms and cheeks. Wet dirt sank beneath me, the root of a mangrove tree twisting around my ankle. I fell to the ground hard, rocks digging under the skin of the palms of my hands. I could hear their laughter. I knew that if they caught me, I would die. I’d made the mistake of reminding the boy that we shared blood. This wasn’t something he liked to acknowledge. He didn’t like what I’d implied. That he and I weren’t so different, even if he called himself master, and me slave.
Their footsteps crunched and paused. I hunched in the thorns of brush, air wheezing from my lungs. I could sense the power that filled my father’s son. His kraft let him see the abilities of others. He could see my ability—could sense me as I sensed him. He felt me hiding. He walked closer.
“I see him.”
I didn’t wait for my brother to grab me, to pick me up and tie his rope around my neck. I leapt to my feet. I ran in the only direction I could, through the thorns and weeds and the tangled roots of the mangrove trees. I burst out of the green and into the sloshing water that pulsed onto the rocky shore. I dove into the sea. Salt burned my eyes and the cuts across my skin. I swam as if I meant to swim to the northern empires and to freedom.
I stopped, because my arms and legs were too heavy and weak. I turned to see my brother and his friend standing on the shore, their hair and clothes and skin pale in the white moonlight. They waited for several minutes, and then they left, bored with the game they played. I should have felt relief, but I knew this wouldn’t be the last time they chased me through the groves of Hans Lollik Helle. It was impossible to feel relief when I knew I would forever have this body and forever have this skin.
The thought crossed my mind. It’s a thought that often does. The question of whether there’s a point to living this life. I’m going to die, whether it’s by the hands of my brother or by the whip of my father or by the years that always manage to catch up with us, regardless of the color of our skin. Does it matter if I die in a few days or a few years or now, saltwater filling my lungs? The result will be the same. If I were to allow myself to sink beneath the waves, it would be a death that would bring mercy. No more racing through the brush of this island. No more beatings and whippings, layers of scars growing on my back like the rings of bark covering the trees, marking how many years I have survived. And there would be no more nights when I was called from the corner of the wooden floor I slept on, marched through the groves and to the pain that waited, as it always does. Letting myself sink into the sea would bring me peace. It would bring me freedom.
The thought crossed my mind—but so did the urge to live. My desire for death and life was a contradiction. Both desires constantly battled inside of me. In the end, life always won.
I began to swim back for shore, but I didn’t notice that the waves of the ocean had already begun to suck me farther away from the island. The tide moved against me as I kicked. Waves became higher, knocking me beneath the surface. Seawater forced its way into my nose and mouth, filling my lungs. I choked with every gasp. Blackness covered my vision.
When I opened my eyes again, I sat on the sand of a shore. It was powdered white without any sign of seashells or footprints or life. The ocean was as still as glass. The sky was red with fire. Islands grew from the sea. Waves rippled as the hills formed, spreading toward the black clouds. My mother was there with me. She stood in the shallows. I could only see her back and the thick scars that wove over her skin, but I knew that it was her. This was often how she came to me, in my nightmares and in my dreams. She would tell me stories. Stories forgotten. Stories buried. My mother told me to listen.
“You’ll want to save them all,” she said.
I woke coughing, vomiting saltwater that burned my throat. Hot sand stuck to my face and my wet skin and clothes. The sky was blue though I’d been running in the night only moments before, the white sunlight scalding the muscle through my skin. Waves pushed and foamed around my legs. No one was on the shore with me. I couldn’t see anyone who might’ve saved me.
It wasn’t a surprise, that I hadn’t died.
It seemed the spirits were never done with me.
CHAPTER ONE
Shock vibrates through me and I feel a fear that isn’t my own. It’s a fear I know well—one that betrays the body whenever death is near. My heart begins to work in my chest. Sweat sticks my shirt to my skin. My limbs feel numb when I stand up. I’d been asleep on a hardwood floor, one I’d known as a boy in the room of an empty slave house where no one will sleep. The others take the empty mansions of the dead kongelig, living like they are masters. I prefer the slaves’ quarters only because I’m alone here, with nothing but the shadows and the ghosts. When I look out of the window, I can see the lights—pinpricks of red and orange fire in the night. The flame reminds me of the night of the revolt. The fire that had spread across the island, the screams and pleas for mercy, the metallic taste of blood that mixed with the salt air. The blood sank into the dirt, and for weeks it smelled as though the island of Hans Lollik Helle was rotting.
It’s not the night of the uprising, and these aren’t people who mean to set the island on fire. I feel their intent. I leave the quarters, shaking as I step down the splintered steps, walking along the dirt that’s filled with rocks and weeds that cut into the bottoms of my feet. The nights are always colder in these islands, but in the time following the storm season, the sun becomes hotter during the day, the dirt capturing the heat that lifts into the air. My legs are weak with sleep, but I force them to run. This fear that fills me doesn’t belong to me. She’s realized that the men are coming for her. She can sense their anger, their hatred. She can see the images of what they plan: to force her legs open, to cut her until she screams for death, to hang her body from a tree. The men are already halfway up the sloping path of the hill. And at the top is the main manor of Herregård Constantjin.
The manor is white against the black sky, glowing in the light of the full moon. It had once appeared like a castle that the northern empires might have, but it crumbles into ruin now, vines and brush and leaves attempting to swallow the manor and pull the stone into its grave, where its masters lay. It was hard work to put the kongelig with their pale skin into the dirt, but the Fjern of these islands believe they will find paradise if they are burned and buried at sea. We would not give them this.
I reach the top of the hill, past the garden of wildflowers and weeds, and walk into the courtyard. The stones are cracked and charred. The fountain, which had once shined in the center of the parties of the kongelig, collapses into chunks of rock. The men stand in a circle. They carry torches that gnats and moths follow, wings flickering in the light. One man comes from the front doors. He pushes the former Elskerinde Rose down the steps. She falls, skinning her hands and knees. When she looks up, her gaze lands on me.
Sigourney Rose could be mistaken for one of us. Her skin is dark enough to hold hues of purple and blue, and her hair is thick with curls. She has the features of an islander. We are known only as islanders because the name we once had was taken by the Fjern, along with our history and our freedom. Our stolen past is what connects our people, yet Sigourney has never been one of us. The proof has always been in the way she looks at us. With fear. Contempt. Longing. She wishes we would accept her, even as she believes she’s our better.