“I’m capable of deciding where I need to be, Friedrich.”
He looks away, scathed. I feel that there’s regret in his gut, regret he hopes I won’t see, though he knows any emotion he has, any thought of his, belongs to me. If I will it, I can hear his thoughts the way I might think to myself; his emotions become my own. It requires effort, yes—energy, to make my mind become one with another’s—but after holding this kraft for so many years, it’s a skill that comes with the ease of racing across the fields of Lund Helle, or holding my breath beneath the sea. I know that Friedrich doesn’t want to kill his own people. Before these uprisings, Friedrich had never killed before, not once in his entire life. He’d been trained to—had learned how to stab and maim and disembowel straw-filled opponents, as have all fifty of the guards of Lund Helle—but he never expected to see his sword shining red. He was surprised how easy it was to take the life of another man. His sword had pressed against the skin of the slave rebel who had run at Friedrich with a machete, and then his sword sliced through that skin and into pink guts, and it stopped as though hitting a rock—the man’s bones, Friedrich later realized—and the man was still alive as Friedrich pulled back his sword, yanking at it with effort. The man looked as surprised as Friedrich felt before he fell to the dirt.
Friedrich killed three more men that day and, when the fighting was done, walked into the brush so that no one could see him or hear him vomit the cold oats and the juices of the sugarcane he’d swiped from the kitchens that morning. He prayed to the gods of the masters, asking for forgiveness, even though the masters don’t believe that taking the life of an islander is a sin, and so there would be nothing to forgive.
Friedrich had hoped he would never have to kill another man again. How disappointed he was to hear of another uprising. “The fight won’t last long,” he tells me. “They never do.”
My horse jerks back and forth beneath me. There’s a clopping of hooves against the rocks scattered across the dirt, kicking dust into the air, already heavy with heat. My cloak sticks to my skin, and my neck and shoulders ache beneath the blistering sun. It’s always hot on this island of mine, but the dry season has lasted a little too long. The crops are failing now, the plantations earning this island less coin every year. Bernhand Lund was put into his grave four years before, and since the title of Elskerinde was passed on to me, there have been nothing but droughts and uprisings. Proof, according to the Fjern of this island, that I shouldn’t have the power that I do.
Lund Helle has no cities, no towns, only isolated collections of houses, which form small plantations holding its slaves and are owned by the few Fjern who live here. An abandoned house we pass leans to its side, as though the wind blew a little too hard one night. A rotted body hangs from a lone mahogany tree, bones visible through the rags it still wears, flies like a layer of living skin. It’s always difficult to tell in death what color a body had once been in life.
I see the smoke of the plantation’s houses before we arrive. It gushes black into the bright blue sky and burns my eyes, even from such a distance. There are brown bodies of islanders in the green field, already swelling in the heat—but there’s no way to tell if these men, women, and children fought alongside the slave rebels, or if they were innocents killed in the clash. I see fallen Fjernmen as well, with their pink skin turning purple and blue. The masters of the plantation. I shouldn’t be so pleased, seeing their bodies on the ground.
I ride closer to the plantation houses, a circle of wooden shacks and lean-tos ablaze. Some bodies have already begun to attract flies. My horse snorts nervously as I throw a leg over and leap to the hard ground, Friedrich and my eleven other guardsmen following. It’s silent—the only sound is the crackling of the fire as it burns each house, splitting wood and stone, making it impossible to get too close as the heat sears the air. I can feel the heat on my skin, my eyes. We stop before a smoldering house that is already crumbling to the ground in embers. A fine layer of sweat and dust and ash covers me.
“Be careful. Some might have kraft,” says Malthe, the captain of my guard.
“You think everyone has kraft,” Friedrich mutters, smirking at me to share his joke.
Malthe has heard. “What was that?”
Friedrich hesitates. “Nothing, sir.”
“Do you think this is funny, Friedrich?”
Embarrassment, then resentment, pulses through Friedrich, but he hides his emotions well. “No, sir.”
It’d only been a joke—a joke born in discomfort, I know. It’s always uncomfortable, seeing the dead. The sight of corpses reminds people of the first time they witnessed death: for me, the guests of my mother’s manor, throats and stomachs cut, painting the flowers with their blood as my mother and sisters and brother were forced to their knees. Friedrich’s memory comes to him as well, I can see now: A child, a boy no older than Friedrich had been, hung upside down by his feet as the master of the plantation taught his son archery. Friedrich often thinks about how easily he could have been chosen instead as the living target. That boy haunts his dreams at night, sometimes even now. The child will watch Friedrich with the same empty stare, arrows riddling his body. What had been the difference between them? The boy wants to know.
Malthe orders the guards to search for survivors. I walk down the path of the desolated plantation. Bodies are sprawled across the floors and straw beds of the slaves’ quarters. In the distance, the fields of sugarcane are alight. Burning fields, charred houses, slaughtered people. This is my legacy.
Movement in the corner of my eye, a flare of rage—I spin and shout a warning, but too late. A man with a drawn machete has cut a guardsman’s neck, so deeply that his head nearly falls. The rebel, machete shining, swings at Friedrich, but I focus on the slave, his rage and fear of death, yes, he wants to live more than anything else, and his mind becomes my mind as he slices his own gut, mouth open in surprise. More islanders burst from behind blackened houses with yells and screams. Machetes and knives drawn, the rebels clash with the swords of my guards, but there aren’t many of them, and they have to know that they’ll die. I enter another rebel, overtaken for a moment by his hopelessness as I see myself through his eyes, the traitorous island woman in my dress of white, my eyes fluttering as my kraft works through my veins, and he turns on his friends, cutting his fellow rebels down. Each man falls dead to the ground until only the man I’ve used is left. He slices his own neck. Pain sears, blood flowing, weakness filling him as he falls. For a moment, I feel death—know what it is to die, just as I have felt a thousand times. The sudden jolt of a heart stopping in your chest, the shock as your own body betrays you. This is what my mother and sisters and brother must have felt.
Friedrich uses a handkerchief to wipe clean his sword before dropping the cloth to the dirt. He’s now killed his sixth man. He’s heard other guards, such as Malthe, say they’ll always remember the face of each man they’ve killed, but the faces of these slave rebels are already starting to blend together for Friedrich: the anger twisting their mouths, the surprise and pain in their eyes. How easily these men could’ve been Friedrich’s friends, family, Friedrich himself. They were driven to desperation, he thinks. He’d had a cruel master once. He knows what it’s like to wonder whether it might be better to fight, knowing he’ll likely die, if there’s a chance he might find a better life.