When I open my eyes, the man is still bleeding. The elderly woman still watches me. The girl’s mother clutches her hands together so tightly they shake. The girl tries so hard not to cry.
I have no more questions—no way of delaying what I know has to come. Malthe stares at me expectantly. I’d hoped he’d let this pass. No one need know we found a slave girl with kraft in the fields of Lund Helle.
When I speak, my voice doesn’t sound like it belongs to me. “The law of Hans Lollik is clear.”
The girl’s mother begins a low wail. This woman will inevitably feel a guilt I’m familiar with—guilt, that she didn’t do enough to save the person she loved. But the guilt will only simmer beneath the rage, the hatred, for me—the one who ordered her daughter’s death.
I don’t even know the girl’s name. “You stand accused of holding kraft, a power that belongs only to your sovereigns of Hans Lollik, gifted as a divine right by the gods that watch over us.”
The woman tries to step in front of her daughter, but the guardsmen pull her and the others aside. The girl shakes her head. Her face crumples as she heaves sobs, tears dripping from the end of her nose. I can’t save her. The Fjern made it clear when they claimed these islands over hundreds of years before: Only they, with their pale skin, are allowed to have kraft; any slave accused of having the power must be found and killed, no matter the innocence, no matter the age. The fact that the Fjern can’t own kraft is one that they despise. My people, descendants of the first islanders before the Fjern ever came, believe the abilities to have come from our ancestors. We whispered that those with kraft were blessed by the spirits. The Fjern disagreed. They don’t believe in the spirits of our ancestors; they declare that their gods pass the kraft on as divine gifts to only the worthy, and to the Fjern, my people are not worthy. I was born with my freedom, and so I’m allowed to keep my life, even with kraft simmering in my veins. This girl wasn’t born with her freedom, and so she’ll die. She’ll become a martyr. The hero in every story but my own.
I recite the words memorized, heavy on my tongue. “Anyone who isn’t of kongelig descent and dares possess kraft, which belongs only to their benevolent rulers as a divine right, must die by execution.”
The woman screams now, fighting against the guards that hold her. I nod at Malthe, and he moves forward dispassionately, pressing down on one of the girl’s shoulders so that she’ll fall to her knees. I look away when he swings his sword.
Silence, but for the crackling of the fires. The girl’s mother has fainted. My hands are shaking. I wipe them on the white of my dress as I turn away, but before I can take another step, the older woman comes forward. She spits at my feet. The metallic smell of blood burning in the heat sickens my stomach, and I feel faint. I don’t have the energy or the will to read this woman’s thoughts—to feel her hatred. But she wants me to know.
“You’re evil,” she tells me. “You might call yourself kongelig, and you might wear your pretty dress of white, but you’re just a dog taking scraps from your masters.”
I could have her executed, too, for being a slave who has shown disrespect to her Elskerinde. The guards, watching closely, will wonder why I don’t. I’m already weak, wavering on my feet, but I close my eyes, and I sink into her—feel myself in her veins as her face tightens, her arms and legs cramping. She steps forward, then lowers to her knees. The woman struggles, fights against me—leans forward to kiss my feet.
She watches only the ground as I walk past her.
I return to my horse, Friedrich following closely behind, and pause by the brush. Most days, I’m able to pretend I’m not caught in a horror of my own making. Easy to pretend I’m not the monster who deserves the hatred of her people. Friedrich looks away when I heave into the leaves.
CHAPTER TWO
Herregård Dronnigen is a manor I’d visited many times before as a child. It was where my paternal cousin Bernhand lived with his wife of the family Lund, nestled right on the edge of Lund Helle, its back fortified by the wall of stone, dirt pathways leading to the sea. I’d enjoyed the sticky mango tarts and the flowers of the gardens and the shallows of the beach, where I would pick up sea urchins with their spiny needles and starfish, feeling their tentacles tickle the palms of my hands. As a child, I never questioned why so many people with brown skin, brown like my own, worked the fields of the plantations; why my nursing maid, and all the cooks and servers and guardsmen, were islanders. I only wondered why the Fjern with their pale skin wouldn’t smile my way as they would with the other little girls in their dresses of lace, why they refused to speak to my mother if ever we passed one another in the streets of other islands of Hans Lollik.
My mother wouldn’t take me or my sisters or brother away from Rose Helle often. I think she wanted to protect us from the hatred she knew we would face—the same hatred she bore every day from the Fjern—but she couldn’t keep us trapped on our little island, in the paradise she had built for us. Inga was left behind in the manor of Rose Helle while my mother brought me, Ellinor, and our older brother, Claus, to Solberg Helle. She had business, I don’t know what. She held my hand on one side and Ellinor’s hand on the other, while Claus walked behind. We had no guards. This I remember. I don’t know why—perhaps my mother wanted to show everyone that she wasn’t afraid of the Fjern. Whatever her reason, it was foolish. She brought us to the main town of Solberg Helle, streets cobblestoned and air salted by the docks. There was a market, dozens of stalls selling stewed mango with cinnamon and stalks of sugarcane. Even I, who would normally stare only at the sweets, was distracted by the gazes that followed us; the Fjern, who stared at my mother with her dark skin, wearing her finery, and at her brown-skinned children, also dressed in lace and pearls. She went into a house, spoke briefly with a Fjernman and exchanged our island’s rose-mallow coin for papers, I don’t know the contents, and I suppose it doesn’t matter—and just as quickly as we’d gone inside, we were out again. But this time, the Fjern who had stood behind their stalls now had words for my mother. They asked why she walked with no master. A Fjernman stood in front of her and demanded to know which family she belonged to. Another suggested he might take me, Ellinor, and Claus away from her, to be sold on the docks of Niklasson Helle. More Fjernmen came, surrounding us. They followed her. They shouted at her. They spat at her feet. Claus grew pale, Ellinor cried, and fear was heavy in my gut. I hadn’t been afraid often as a child—I didn’t know I’d had anything to fear—but I was afraid that day. And through it all, my mother only walked forward, her chin raised, as though she were taking a stroll with us down the shoreline, with nothing before us but the sea.
My mother was usually kind and gentle, but once we returned to the ship that would bring us to Rose Helle, she slapped Ellinor for crying. She told us never to let the Fjern see our fear again.
“This is what they want to see,” she told us. “Don’t ever give them what they want.”
Dronnigen shines, stones painted white faded by the everlasting sun. I jump from my horse, rocks crunching beneath my sandals, and hand the reins to Friedrich before I step into the hall. Paintings of the deceased Lund and Rose families line the walls, portraits that Bernhand Lund had installed out of respect before his own death. There’s my father, dead shortly after my birth—I was too young to have any memories of him now—along with my mother and two sisters and one brother. My mother was beautiful, with black hair curling atop her head, skin as dark as the purples of the night sky, brown eyes lined by lashes so thick it’s as though she wore kohl, and a proud, wide nose sitting above an even wider mouth. I remember that she had scars lining her arms and back, and one thick scar from her ear and across her neck, but the scars aren’t in her portrait. I look more like her painting every day.