She stands to her feet in the center of the six men, her hair tangled, her dress of white torn and stained. She has been beaten, her bruises and cuts unhealed. Her face shines with sweat and fear in the torchlight, but she raises her chin. She was already prepared to fight for her life. Sigourney’s kraft has always been powerful. It might be one of the most powerful abilities in all the islands. She can enter the spirit of another. She can hear their thoughts and feel their emotions. She can take control of their body, if she so desires. Sigourney was prepared to take control of any one of these men with their machetes and have him cut all the others down, but she knew the chances of her surviving the fight were slim. She wouldn’t be able to take control of more than one man at a time. Even if she had managed to survive, she couldn’t fight her way to freedom from the entire island. She would be executed for killing guards, no matter that they’d attacked her first. I understand the mix of desperation and relief in her eyes when she sees me.
My voice echoes in the courtyard. “What’re you doing?”
The group of men whirl around. They’re surprised. They weren’t expecting to see me here. I recognize them all. I know each of their names. They were once guards that belonged to the Fjern across all the islands—guards who were trained to give their lives for the kongelig. They took the lives of the kongelig instead.
Sigourney doesn’t want any of these men to see her fear, and she worries I’ll feel her desperation. She takes a deep breath and holds the air in her chest, counting in her head, just as Marieke had once taught her to do when she needed to calm herself.
“Why have you taken Sigourney Rose from her chamber?” I ask. No one responds. Night birds and crickets and frogs make their noise. It’s almost hard for the men to hear me over the chorus. “Whose orders are you acting on?”
“Our own,” one of the men says. His name is Georg. He’s young—as young as I am, though taller and more solidly built, with the muscles of a man who had been made to work the fields before he was brought into the guard. He hasn’t been trained as a guard long, only a year and a few months, but he could still best me in a match if he were to attack—especially when I would be reluctant to fight him. I don’t see the point in hurting another islander. We already have too many enemies.
The other five men are guards trained under Malthe. I can see that they’re afraid that they will be punished for acting without their commander’s consent. All of the men look away from me with a mixture of shame and fear. One man named Frey, older than the rest, curses Georg in his head. It’d been the boy’s idea, and Frey had been stupid enough to follow along. Frey thinks he came only because of the guavaberry rum they’d drunk around the fire at camp. He can’t admit to himself that even without the rum, he might have come here so that he could help kill Sigourney Rose. Frey had belonged to her cousin Bernhand Lund before the man died, and for the last years he had been the property of the former Elskerinde. Frey wanted to see her die. Now, because he’s followed the stupid boy’s idea, he could be tied by his wrists to a tree and whipped by Malthe himself. This would be the lucky option, considering the chance that he could be hung by his neck instead. No one fights Malthe’s methods. These are the ways taught to us by the Fjern. It’s the only way that we know.
Only Georg holds my gaze. It isn’t that he’s braver than the rest. He has more anger. Rage pulses hot through him. He wants to see Sigourney Rose dead, like she should have died the night of the uprising. No, she is not a Fjern. But she, too, was a kongelig. She had her slaves. She’s had us tied to trees and whipped, myself included. She ordered my whipping and didn’t have the respect to stay and watch as the whip cut into my back and the scars already woven there, rising from my skin. Elskerinde Rose had ordered my execution. She stood and watched as I stood on a chair, a rope around my neck. She was as evil and merciless as any of the kongelig on this island. Georg doesn’t understand why she still lives. He doesn’t understand why I stop him from killing her.
Sigourney looks from me to Georg and back to me, watching us like someone might watch a game of cards. She learned from an early age that there’s power in pretending to hold control of herself and her emotions. But she sees that whoever wins this match will decide whether she will live or die.
“You don’t have the authority to take Sigourney Rose’s life.”
“Authority? You speak like the Fjern.”
“We each have our roles. We each have our commands.” I pause, looking from Georg to the other men. They still won’t meet my eye. “If we didn’t have our orders, the revolution would collapse.”
“And who’s to say we haven’t fallen apart already?” Georg demands. I can feel the frustration in him. The frustration has streaks of anger, but it’s tied to a helplessness and a hopelessness. It’s been nearly a month since the initial uprising, and we haven’t done anything more to force the Fjern and their royal kongelig from our homelands. Georg believes that we stay on this island, waiting for the moment we will be slaughtered by the Fjern. He isn’t the only person who worries that this revolution has been lost before it’s barely begun. At least in this, Georg will feel like he’s doing something of importance. Something that will help the war.
But he’s wrong. “Killing Sigourney Rose is a mistake.”
“It’s a mistake that she’s still alive.” He looks to his friends for help, but none will come forward. They fear me. This isn’t something that makes me glad. “You can’t keep her alive with no good reason, when everyone else wants her dead.”
“We don’t know if we’ll need her,” I say.
“Why would we ever need her alive?” Georg asks me. He speaks with an exasperated tone. He thinks that I’m lying to him. He thinks I believe him to be a fool. “Do you think the Fjern want her? She isn’t a hostage. We can’t use her in negotiations.”
I hesitate, but only for a moment. “You’re right.”
Sigourney sucks in a breath. It’s slight. Only she can hear it, but I feel the surprise in her. Even if this is the truth, there was no need for me to speak it. I could have said that the Fjern have declared a ransom for her, or that they declared they needed her kraft and were willing to negotiate—any lie I could think of in the moment to make these guards leave without attempting to take her life. But I’m not like Sigourney. I do not lie. When she had me as her slave, working as her personal guard, and as I took my steps in the downfall of Elskerinde Rose and the kongelig, I would always tell her the simple truth. I told her that those closest to her wanted her dead. I’ve never seen the point in lies.
“She isn’t useful collateral, and she’s made too many mistakes,” I say. “It would be satisfying to kill her and be done with it.” Sigourney worries that I’ve changed my mind. I continue, looking at her with the pity I can’t help but feel. “But she’s still an islander. We have a chance to rebuild our home. When you envision our homeland, what do you see?” I ask the men. “Do you see a land of blood and violence, fighting for power, an echo of the Fjern? Or do you see a land as it was meant to be?”
I feel the emotions of the men in front of me. Their rage. Their pain. They’ve all lost so much. Georg’s brother didn’t survive the night of the uprising. I see his memories as though they’re my own. His brother wasn’t family by blood but was a man Georg had always looked up to, who had cared for Georg as if the boy was his own. His brother had been made to join the guard years before. It was the reason Georg joined as well. He was trained under the heat of the sun, so searing hot that some men fell under its mercy and died of stroke. Georg was whipped nearly every day for any mistake he made in his training, his back a tangle of scars. And it was all so he could have a chance to be closer to the only family Georg had. His brother stood like an unbending tree in front of the kongelig. Even when he was whipped, hung by his wrists from a tree, it seemed to Georg that the man was unbreakable. The day the whispers had spread of a revolt, Georg’s brother had asked for him to stay in the barracks—to stay out of the fight. Let him and the other guards fight for their freedom. Georg was too anxious for his blade to cut flesh and bone. He joined the fight the night of the revolution. His brother learned that he hadn’t stayed in the safety of the barracks and left his position to look for Georg. Georg had found his brother dead on the beach, his stomach cut open. Georg punishes himself. He should have stayed in the barracks like his brother asked him to. Georg believes that he should be dead instead. But he’s still alive. This is what makes him angriest of all.