PROLOGUE
My mother kissed my forehead with a smile when I cried, upset that the party would carry on as I was sent away to sleep, and while I lay awake in my bed of lace, huddled beneath my covers and shivering in the cool trade-winds breeze, I heard when the tinkling piano stopped and when the laughter turned to screams. I slipped out of bed and went to my balcony of stone to see the garden below, streaks of yellow light falling from the windows and across the grass where my mother’s guests were ushered to the rose mallow by the men with their drawn machetes. I saw my sisters crying, my brother struggling, my mother pleading as they were forced to their knees. A hand covered my eyes, but I heard the moment their tangled screams were swallowed by silence.
Tante carried me away from the balcony, breathless, the front of my dress covered with red that was already turning to rust. My voice had been stolen away, but she still kept her calloused hand over my mouth as we ran down the shadowed hall, into an abandoned chamber, snapping a door shut behind us. Men shouted, their boots echoing on the marbled floor.
“Do exactly as I say,” Tante whispered to me, “or the Jannik guards will find you, and it doesn’t matter that you’re only a child—they’ll kill you, just as they killed your brother and sisters.”
Tante wouldn’t release my mouth until I nodded that I understood. She opened a closet, then fell to her knees to unlock a trapdoor. She told me to climb down the ladder and walk to the end of the tunnel until I reached the groves. There would be a saltwater river. I was to follow the river until I reached a cave. I was to wait, hidden, until a woman came to look for me. We both knew that woman would not be Tante, because Tante would stay behind in the manor, and she would be killed.
She saw the fear shining in my eyes. “Your mother would want you to survive. Do you hear me, Sigourney? Your mother would want you to live.”
I ran, salt drying on my cheeks and nose.
Guilt that I hadn’t done anything to save them tightening around my neck.
Most days I find that I still can’t breathe.
CHAPTER ONE
The invitation is a plain piece of yellowing parchment, folded shut—thin enough that I can see the red of my fingers shining through, as though the paper is a layer of skin in my hands. The paper itself hasn’t been perfumed with the scent of crushed flower petals, as most posts from the kongelig tend to be. Only the seal of white wax, with the sunburst insignia of Hans Lollik Helle, marks the letter in any way.
It’s an invitation I’ve been waiting to receive for nearly ten years: a symbol of all I’ve worked for, and everything still to come. I hold it in my hands, staring at the seal, my heartbeat drumming through my veins. Now that the moment has finally arrived, I can’t bring myself to read the words.
Marieke sweeps into my room with a woven basket of fresh sheets. She sees the letter in my hands, noting the tremble in my fingers before I have a chance to steady them.
“What’s that?” she asks briskly, even though she knows exactly what it is. She strips the sheets from my bed, and when I don’t answer she says, without sparing me another glance, “Aren’t you going to open it?”
I place the invitation atop the stand beside my bed.
Marieke watches me as she straightens my new sheets. Marieke has always valued patience, so it’s almost amusing when she sucks her teeth as she fluffs my pillows. She thinks I’m falling apart. She can’t blame me, she knows—the pressure I’ve put on myself with this goal of mine would be enough to break anyone. I’ve whispered to her at night that this plan is the only reason I’m still alive. Marieke believed me when I told her, and she thought it was sad, too, that a child should ever say that they want to die, but Marieke has known many children who’ve felt life wasn’t worth living.
There’s been another slave uprising, this time on a sugarcane planation in the fields to the east, so I ride with my twelve personal guardsmen across Lund Helle, through the groves of tangled brush and branches and thorns, weaving beneath the blessed shade of coconut and palm trees, crossing the fields of guinea grass shimmering in the breeze. Lund is the flattest of its sister islands, so the grass stretches on for miles, without any relief from the sun, which seems to reflect against everything here—the white of my dress, the blue of the sea forever shining in the corner of my eye, even the air itself. The heat is a living thing. It burns the corners of my eyes and lips, already cracking from the salt that’s carried from the ocean on the wind.
The ocean has always terrified me. It isn’t meant for the living. The water, burning my eyes and nose and throat, can so easily fill my lungs; the power of the tide can pull me beneath its waves. Most frightening of all are the spirits. My sister Ellinor would whisper to me that they walk the ocean floor, waiting for their chance at vengeance against the living; that their hands will pull you into the depths, so that your body, like theirs, can turn to salt and sand, and you can join them in waiting for a chance at revenge.
She’d told me this when I was a girl child, so young I could barely walk anywhere on my own without clutching at my eldest sister’s skirts. I’d wanted to know if what Ellinor said was true, so I walked into the water—walked until I could no longer feel the sand beneath my feet. I took a deep breath and let myself sink beneath the surface and opened my eyes, stinging in the salt. There were no spirits standing in the sand, waiting for their revenge. All I could see was the coral, the schools of fish flashing silver in the light, the seaweed swaying beneath the waves. I decided Ellinor was a liar and turned to swim back to shore, but the tide was strong that day. I was pulled away from the shore. I would have kicked my legs, just as I’d been taught, but it was like I’d become stationary, unable to move. I swam, swallowing saltwater, unable to cry for help, but I was only pulled farther and farther, until I began to wonder if my sister had been right after all and if the spirits had grasped me by my legs, even if I couldn’t see them or feel their hands.
My limbs became weak and numb, and I sank, my lungs burning and my vision fading away. I should’ve drowned, but when I opened my eyes again, I was back on the sand, salt drying on my skin. No slaves were nearby to claim that they’d jumped into the water and rescued me; my family was still in the gardens, enjoying their tea. It was just me, alone on the shore. The spirits weren’t ready to take me yet.
I know that the path we take is dangerous. It leaves us too vulnerable, too much in the open. We’re practically inviting an ambush. This would’ve been a silly thought, once, on an island like Lund Helle. The island only has a few sugarcane plantations, with houses scattered in between, but there’ve been three slave uprisings in as many months. Before this, the last uprising was nearly twenty years ago, when Bernhand Lund was still alive and Herre of this island. All the masters of the plantation had been killed. Herre Lund ended the uprising swiftly. Every slave on the plantation, whether they claimed innocence or not—whether they were children or not—was executed, their bodies staked and hung from trees so that the other slaves of this island could see. No other islander has attempted an uprising since, not until now.
Friedrich rides beside me. “You didn’t have to come,” he says again for the second time this morning. “It’s a simple group of slaves that have now decided to call themselves rebels.”