I refused him, at first. This is what I remind myself in consolation. I refused him and told him that he’s a child for thinking he wants me. But though I own my life, it’s not a good life I live, and Friedrich is a distraction I desperately need. He’s young and foolish in his ambition, cocky in his thoughts of surpassing his peers to follow Malthe and become captain of the Lund guard—but still handsome, with his dark skin and sculpted muscles and his smile, a smile that isn’t easy to find on these islands, and certainly not this island of mine. And even I can’t ignore that my body has its own needs, its own desires.
I tell Friedrich I’d like to make a trip to Jannik Helle, and I can sense his impatience. It’ll be my second trip this month alone. Still, he nods his understanding as he kneels beside the body of one of the slave rebels, machete still clenched in his hand where he fell. Checking the rebel’s pockets, Friedrich pauses with a frown and withdraws his hand, staring into his palm.
“What is it?” I ask him, though I see a flicker of his vision.
He offers his hand to me. He holds a rusted red coin. I pick it up and turn it over. The coin has the crest of a crude zinnia flower, the symbol belonging to the Ludjivik family.
Friedrich stands, brushing off his knees. “Do you think they were behind this?”
“I wouldn’t put it past them,” I say. “An ill-fated attempt at supporting and supplying a slave rebellion against me.”
“Unless they meant to lose. What if this was meant as a distraction, or they hope to make you feel secure before attacking again?” They will take this island from you.
I toss the coin into the dirt. “It isn’t incriminating to find a coin. Maybe one of the slaves recently traveled to Ludjivik Helle and took it.”
Friedrich doesn’t look convinced. I don’t need to enter his mind to know his thoughts: There are those in the islands of Hans Lollik who want to see me dead, and if I’m not careful, eventually one will succeed.
Friedrich and I start the walk to our horses. The rest of my guardsmen will stay, searching for clues and valuables under Malthe’s watch, before starting the back-bending work of burying each of the slaves’ bodies at sea. The dead masters of the plantation will be returned to the Fjern for a ceremonial burial so that they will easily find the gods.
Before we get far, a guardsman hurries down the rocky path.
“Elskerinde Lund,” he says, breathless. He catches my eye, and when I look to his thoughts, a wave of his fear crashes into me, dread sinking into my bones. Fear that I’ll learn of all his secrets, of the extra goat stew he’s been stealing at night, and maybe even of the little boy he watched drown so many years ago—
“Spit it out,” Friedrich says.
The man hesitates. “We found survivors.” He doesn’t look at me as he continues to speak. “One of them has kraft.”
We follow the guard back up the path to the burning plantation houses with my nine other guardsmen, waiting in a circle and turning to watch my arrival. A line of the survivors stands in the center of the circle, all slaves. A man, middle-aged and frail—thinner than most, it’s clear that he holds a sickness in his lungs, perhaps caught from the last storm season, something he never managed to shake. A woman, her skin a maze of wrinkles, toothless so that her lips sink in like a skull. She watches me. She isn’t afraid. She’s already so close to death. What could I possibly do to make her afraid? There’s another woman as well, breathing heavily as she grips the hand of the girl beside her. The girl is young, perhaps no older than thirteen. She and her mother have the same eyes, the same mouths.
Though he’d been so willing to joke about kraft before, Friedrich takes the matter seriously now. “Do you think the one with kraft caused the uprising?” he asks me, eyes on the islanders.
That would depend on the power, and the strength, of the kraft itself. My chest burns. “Which one?” I ask Malthe.
He marches to the villagers and pushes the girl forward, forcing her to let go of her mother. The girl winces, struggling not to cry, shoulders shaking with the effort. My heart drops. She reminds me too much of my sister Inga, crying as she was forced to her knees.
My mouth is dry, words scratching my throat. “How do you know she has kraft?”
“She tried to use her power on us—confused us for a moment, made us forget who we were, what we were doing here, then tried to run with the others. When we captured them and threatened to kill them all if no one spoke the truth, she stepped forward.”
The man in the line of slaves speaks. “She’s just a girl. She was afraid, thought you were rebels. They were killing all of us, not just the masters—”
Malthe jams the hilt of his sword into the man’s nose. The slave falls with a shout of pain, blood streaming between his fingers as he clutches his face. If he thought he was safe, facing his own people with not a single Fjern in sight, he was mistaken.
“You’ll speak when we ask you a question,” Malthe says to all of them. “Is that clear?”
No one moves or makes a sound. The woman with her skin of wrinkles watches me.
“Were you fighting with the rebels?” I ask the girl.
She glances up, terrified, before looking at the ground again. She’s willing to tell us anything and everything if it means she’ll live. Even if she doesn’t own her life, she still wants it. “No—I wasn’t, I promise you. They weren’t of this plantation. No one recognized them. They came here and attacked us. Killed everyone. They weren’t from Lund Helle, they were speaking of returning to their ships.”
Friedrich gives me a pointed look. I ignore him, glancing Malthe’s way, and he nods. The ships will be found and searched.
I ask, “Where were the rebels from?”
The girl doesn’t know the answer. She’s frightened I won’t be pleased. “I—I think maybe Niklasson Helle.” She’s lying. There’s no reason for her to think the rebels came from Niklasson Helle.
I pause. I can feel their fear. Fear that they’ll all be killed for failing to protect their masters. Fear that I’ll decide they’re lying, and that they were all a part of the rebellion. Fear from all—except for the older woman. She stares at me, blue film over her eyes. She’s seen more hatred, more evil, than I ever have—probably more than I ever will. The Fjern, who gave me the power I hold, stalking through the plantations in the dead of night when she was a child. Raping her mother and her sister and herself, slicing open the bottoms of her feet and burning the palms of her hands and making her work the fields, threatening death if she stopped for even a breath, hanging her father for daring to meet his master’s eye, beating and whipping and tying up a little boy child and leaving him outside in the sun to be eaten away by the salt air, and all because he wouldn’t stop crying for his mother after she was sold away. Islanders, tying rocks around their ankles and walking into the sea to escape the hell of Hans Lollik.
To the slaves before me—to all the islanders—I’m the traitor to her own people. My skin might be brown, and my blood might belong to these islands, but I’m no better than the Fjern. My heart thumps harder. I close my eyes. Try to push their thoughts aside—their hatred for me, their fear of me—but I realize that the feelings are my own.