His eyes are earnest, and because he’s risen through my guard so quickly, I sometimes forget that he’s young—eighteen, two years younger than me. This only reminds me that I’m young as well. “Do you think I should?” I ask him.
“I think you should be happy.”
“Do I seem so unhappy now?”
He hesitates, and in my impatience I push my way into his thoughts. His memory takes me to the afternoon sun, the screams of a woman, and what I’d looked away from but what Friedrich forced himself to watch: the white flash of the sword, the blinding red, the girl’s body crumpling into the dirt, her head with her eyes clenched shut rolling in the grass.
I sit up, dizzy in the heat. “You should leave.”
He kisses my bare shoulder, still watching me.
I ask him, “Do you really think you’re in love with me?”
His brows pull together. “Why do you say that?”
“Because I see it in your thoughts. You believe you’re in love with me, but your love for me is a child’s, before he even knows what love is. You tell yourself you love me, to stop yourself from hating me instead.”
“You always do this,” he tells me, voice low.
“And what is that?”
“Push me away. Try to hurt me. Why? So that you won’t feel weak? Because you might start to love me, too?”
“I don’t love you, Friedrich.”
He stands up, abandoning the sheets, and bends over to pick up his shirt and tug it on over his head. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Why would you love a slave?”
I’m silent as he buttons his shirt and pulls on his pants. “Even if you think you love me,” I say, “you shouldn’t waste it on me. Fall in love with a sweet island girl instead. One who’ll smile every time she sees you.”
He shakes his head. “What do you mean, I shouldn’t waste my love on you?”
I can feel his heart, thumping with anger, begin to soften—can feel the pity in him as he walks back to my bed and sits on the edge. “I’m not wasting my love on you.”
He truly believes he loves me, but this love isn’t real. It’s imagined, a story he tells himself, and while he sees me as the princess in the fairy tales we heard as children, I’m nothing more than the wicked queen. I’m not deserving of this false love, even as I take it and use it to comfort myself. I’m only deserving of his hatred. This I can sense also—embers of his hatred for me, burning beneath his skin. If he admitted his hatred of me, he might not be able to stand the sight of me, the woman he’s meant to protect. He might take the sword meant for killing rebels and cut my neck instead.
I tell Friedrich that Marieke will come by any moment, and I can feel his frustration, but he nods his understanding and kisses me again before leaving my chambers, boots in his hands. I sit in my bed, knees curled to my chest. My room is usually a welcomed sanctuary—a slight reprieve from the island and its responsibilities, though not from my own thoughts, my own ambitions. That’s never something I’ll be able to escape, maybe not even when I’m dead and in my grave of the sea. But today, I look again to the table beside my bed and the awaiting letter I haven’t had the courage to open or read. I already know what it’ll say—have waited for its arrival for nearly half my life.
The marbled floor of my chamber shines yellow in the bright sunlight that spills from the open balcony windows, lace curtains leaving intricate patterns on the walls. It’s a clear day, and I can see three of the other dozens of islands under the rule of Hans Lollik in the distance: Solberg Helle is farthest, green hills faded in the distance; Niklasson Helle is a jagged rock that reaches for the sky. Rose Helle is closest. I can see the browning of the trees, the bald spots where fires spread so many years before. My mother’s island had been beautiful, once. It was the smallest of the islands of Hans Lollik, with no plantations and only a scattering of houses. I would run through the groves with Ellinor and hold Inga’s hand as she took me to the shores. Claus had been the quietest of us, the shyest. He would spend his days in the library, reading his books on the histories of Hans Lollik Helle and the northern empires. Ellinor had only been interested in the fairy tales. She would beg Inga and our mother to read them to her, no matter the time of morning or night. But I would come to Claus. He was fourteen. He had the lightest skin of us all and curly brown hair that showed the blood of the Fjern ancestor who lived so many eras before. Claus was lighter-skinned than even the Fjern who worked long days under the hot sun. The Fjern didn’t like Claus and the color of his skin. It was too strong a reminder of how close the islanders and the Fjern truly were, despite the Fjern’s claims to higher intelligence, and their divine purpose in oppressing the dark-skinned islanders. It was their justification: The Koninkrijk Empire claimed that the Fjern must spread their rule over the lesser savages of this world.
Claus didn’t lie to himself. He knew that the color of his skin wouldn’t make the Fjern accept him, knew that the Fjern would hate him more than any of us. Our father had taken Claus with him on all of his meetings across the islands. He showed Claus and his son’s lighter skin with pride. Claus had hated our father. He told me this, plainly, when I asked my older brother to tell me about the man who had given us our name and our freedom. He said that our father lovingly kissed the feet of the Fjern, who would kick him in the mouth. Koen Rose didn’t want to be seen as a threat. He was happy to be treated like a dog if it meant he could continue his family’s legacy in the sugarcane business.
My father, though an islander, wasn’t a kind master. He would have the slaves beaten, just like any of the other Fjern, and though he wouldn’t torture the slaves as some might, Claus knew it was because he saw each slave as an investment and a profit. It didn’t matter that their skin was as dark as his own. My father had no feeling for them and did whatever he could in the eyes of the kongelig to distance himself from them—to make it clear that, though he looked like an islander, he’d still had an ancestor of the Fjern generations before. He had tried to marry into any of the Fjern families, but none would have him, so he decided on my mother, the most beautiful islander he had seen, even with her scars.
Claus didn’t want to inherit the sugarcane business or the island of Rose Helle if it meant he had to pretend to hold love for the Fjern. Claus would tell me the histories he learned, since I was still too young to read about the north myself. There are seven nations to the north, three more to the east, and two to the west; only our islands cross the sea. Claus explained to me that the Fjern came from their empire of Koninkrijk, which was the farthest north and by far the coldest of them all. The northern empire is oppressive, with little mercy for those who disobey the laws of the land, which they believe come as direct orders from the gods above. Claus had laughed when I asked if the Fjern envied the heat of our islands—if this is why they took the land from us.
My bedroom door opens without a knock, and Marieke strides in as she always does, a pan of water in her hands. “The girls are gossiping about how your guard was seen walking barefoot down this hall,” she says. “You need to be more careful. You don’t want these rumors spreading to your betrothed, do you?”
“Good day to you, too, Marieke.”