I open my eyes. The headache had grown so much that I was sure my head had been split open with a machete, but it’s gone now. There’s a distant relief of pressure tingling over my skull, like it was a limb that’d fallen asleep. After the feeling is gone, I stand where I am, breathing slowly and taking the air into my lungs, reminding myself that I hadn’t fallen into the ocean and that I hadn’t almost drowned. I’m not confused about what’s happened. I already see the answer, and she does, too. I don’t understand why, but for that single moment, my kraft had connected me with Sigourney.
It’s happened before when I’m standing in front of her, not using my own power to block hers. But I’m not standing in front of Sigourney. She’s on the other end of this manor, down several halls and up a broken staircase, inside the chamber that has become her prison. The night before I’d woken and realized, without a doubt, that guards were on the way to kill her.
When Malthe asks to speak with me, his voice echoes in the otherwise empty hall. I’m still reeling, but I can’t let him see my weakness. I force myself to stand straight and face him. I pretend that I’d only been lost in thought. Malthe doesn’t force a smile in greeting as he approaches me. The tension between us has grown. I don’t like games of the mind or of actions spurred by emotion. I thought that Malthe was the same. He has a silence that engulfs him. It was a silence I’d once admired, but I can see how dangerous it actually is.
I’d spent years as a child training under Malthe, cutting his targets down with a precision that impressed him, though he would never admit to it. I’d looked up to him then. He was the only example I’d had of an islander with his dark skin and thick hair who was close enough to be a father. He didn’t love me. I didn’t think so then, and I know this as a fact now. He didn’t love me as he might’ve loved a son, but he did respect me. He had been suspicious of me when he first learned that I was the son of Engel Jannik, and he assumed that I would think myself better than all the other guards. It wasn’t a wrong assumption to make. I did have some years where I considered myself better and stronger than those around me. I was angry that they would look at me with disgust because of the Fjern blood I had in my veins. I would work hard to prove myself greater than all of them. I’d convinced myself that if I could best them in sparring and training, the other guards would begin to see me and accept me as one of them. As the islander that I am. These were the dreams of a child. I’ve always been held at a distance. I’ve never been accepted as one of my people.
I’d worked hard enough that as a boy Malthe noted my talent, but he had pushed me away when I came to him, asking him to let me join the uprising. He feared that I’d been sent by my father to root out the rebellion. It was months before I was able to convince him that I hated the Fjern as much as he does, if not more. Malthe didn’t love me as a son, but he had loved me as someone who might be able to follow in his footsteps one day—who he could train to continue his legacy. He didn’t consider that I might one day surpass him.
We walk the halls of the abandoned manor together. I can feel the echoes of Agatha’s loss in every step. Her kraft had made this manor seem like a place of power. She’d fooled all of the kongelig and the islanders who weren’t a part of the oncoming rebellion, making Herregård Constantjin look and smell and feel like a castle of the Koninkrijk Empire. Now, the walls rot, the marble floor is cracked, and mold spreads from the ceilings.
“She’d been gifted,” Malthe says.
“Too gifted,” I add, not because it’s something that I think, but because I can feel the words come from Malthe’s mind. He doesn’t miss the moment, glancing at me. We haven’t acknowledged, not any of us, that it seems my kraft has evolved in ways I wasn’t expecting. This isn’t new. Kraft can grow, just as the person it belongs to grows. I’m not sure what it means yet, that I can still feel the power of Sigourney Rose’s kraft inside of me, even when she isn’t anywhere near, or that I can sense the strategic thoughts filling Geir’s mind so much more vividly than I would have been able to months ago.
“Yes. Too gifted, perhaps,” Malthe concedes. “Her gift made her powerful, and she loved power. It made her foolish.”
“Do you think it’s wrong to feel drawn to power?” I ask Malthe.
He doesn’t answer me. “Your own power has grown,” he says.
“My kraft, you mean.”
“Your kraft, but your power as well. The others look to you for leadership. Guidance. Is that a role you’re ready for?”
“You don’t think that I am.”
“No, I don’t,” Malthe agrees. “You lead with your heart.”
The comment surprises me. I don’t consider myself someone ruled by emotion.
“You want to show mercy to everyone around, including our enemies. That isn’t how one wins a war. Mercy is the downfall of revolutions.”
“I won’t show mercy to the Fjern. The real problem is that you believe Sigourney Rose is the enemy, and I’m not convinced that she is.”
“But how could she not be the enemy, Løren?” he asks, frustration cracking through.
“You’re unable to see because of your own biases.”
“My own biases,” he echoes.
“You hate her.”
“Yes, of course I do. I hate all of the kongelig.”
“You hate her especially.”
“And don’t you?” Malthe asks. He stops and turns to me. A window behind him is shattered, filling the hall with the white heat of the island. “She was a traitor. She left all of us enslaved, and had she been granted the throne, she would’ve kept the islands as they were, wearing her crown and dresses of white.”
“I believe she can change.”
“You’re a fool,” he tells me. “You’ll be the end of us.”
“How can we claim to be different from Sigourney Rose? How can we claim to be different from the kongelig, or any of the Fjern, if we torture and kill without mercy, just as they’ve done to us?”
“We aren’t claiming to be different,” Malthe tells me. “We’re only claiming our freedom.”
He leaves me there as I stand in the direct light filtering in through the window, my skin prickling with sweat. From where I stand in the silence of the halls, I can hear the evening songs and prayers beginning to rise around the island. The people speak to the ancestors. It was something the Fjern had forbidden us to do. Anyone caught murmuring their prayers to the spirits of our ancestors had their tongue cut from their mouth. Our people had become skilled at practicing our faith in secret, on the bays and in the groves at night where the Fjern could not see or hear us. The songs were taught to most of us as children. I still remember the older woman, whose name I’d never learned, teaching me our prayers of gratitude. She told me this was something that separated us from the Fjern. We prayed to our ancestors to show our thanks, while the Fjern prayed to their gods so that they could beg for more.
I walk out of the manor and into the courtyard where I’d stood so many times, watching the kongelig with their glittering parties of white and where I’d saved Sigourney just the night before. I can see the white manors that had belonged to the kongelig families, scattered across the island as I walk down the sloping path that leads to the groves. Most of the trees were burned down in the battle. The ashes and blackened carcasses of palms and trunks remain. Women sing their prayer songs as they work to clear the debris, their skirts tied into knots around their knees. Some bend over the dirt, replanting seeds. If we don’t survive this war, our people believe that after we’ve lost our bodies, we’ll live on in the islands alongside our ancestors. The trees, the sea, the hills of green: This is what we must respect more than our flesh and bone. One woman named Ulrike sees me. She stands, dusting the dirt from her legs, and she comes to me as she always does, taking my hands and gripping them in hers. She squeezes her eyes closed as she murmurs a prayer.