He’d had a friend, once; yes, hard to believe, but he did. No one had ever wanted anything to do with Løren: He was Engel Jannik’s son and had the blood of the Fjern in him. The other slaves believed Løren thought he was better than they, and he can admit now that he did think this, not because of the Fjern blood in his veins but because he wondered why they wouldn’t fight for their freedom. They seemed content to wake day after day and do their masters’ bidding, without considering for a moment that they might take the machetes they used to work the fields and cut their masters’ stomachs open instead. He wondered why they didn’t run. He ran, time and again, and received the beatings and whippings, knowing all the while that he would still try again, even if it meant that he failed, even if it meant that he would lose his life. He couldn’t imagine living as the other slaves of the Jannik household did: as though their freedom wasn’t worth fighting for. As though their freedom wasn’t worth dying for.
They hated him for it, yes, and he told himself he hated them as well. But there was one boy. He was soft, touched in the head, as the other slaves liked to say, dropped as a baby and not worth much coin. He might’ve been drowned as an infant by Engel Jannik, if Engel had taken enough notice of him. The boy was eight years older than Løren, but acted as though he were five. He wanted to play games with Løren all of the time, even when he was nineteen years old, a man who should’ve been working the fields. They’d play hide and seek in the groves; if they were caught, they’d be whipped, but Løren’s friend didn’t seem to care. One day Løren saw an unused cave, well hidden by the mangroves. It was stocked with supplies. A forgotten hiding spot for smugglers, most likely. Løren knew that he could survive in the cave for an entire week, and once the search party gave up looking for him on this island, and even the nearest islands—once they all assumed he’d drowned trying to escape—he’d leave in the dead of night.
He told his friend his plan, and even offered to let the boy join him; and though he seemed uncertain, the boy said yes. It was on the night that they were meant to escape together that Løren got to the cave first. He waited, afraid that his friend had gotten lost or had changed his mind or become too scared to look for the cave without Løren there to guide him. Løren soon heard the hurried footsteps of his friend, but he’d brought someone with him: Engel Jannik and a set of guards. The boy pointed to Løren with a smile, hoping for Engel’s approval. Løren had received the majority of his scars that night. It was bad enough, yes, that he so often plotted to escape on his own, but the idea that he might consider taking any of Engel’s other slaves with him was too dangerous. Engel had actually meant to kill his son; when Løren was still breathing at the end of it all, Engel had ordered the guards to hang the boy by his wrists and let him starve. A night later, and he was still breathing. Three days later, and he was still alive. The other slaves grew afraid of him and wouldn’t come near the tree from which he hung. They whispered that he’d been cursed—that a vengeful spirit had entered him, and that this was why Løren wouldn’t die.
Engel didn’t believe in the superstition of the savages, but he couldn’t help but feel dread, fear, seeing his flesh and blood hanging by his wrists, head lolling and eyes half-open. He had Løren cut down and fed and washed, his wounds covered in salve. Still, Engel Jannik was angry that Løren had managed to survive his punishment, and so he had Løren’s friend brought forth and hung from a tree, before all of the plantation. The slave hadn’t been worth very much coin anyway.
“Do you believe the spirits mean to keep you alive?” I ask him.
I can feel the answer in him, but before he says a word, the doors to the sitting room open, and Aksel stands before us, machete in his hand. I barely have a moment to open my mouth before he runs at Løren, barely have a chance to scream before he tries to cut his brother’s neck. Løren grabs his brother’s wrist, straining against him as the blade aims for his chest. The blade is knocked from Aksel’s hand, and the two lunge for it as it slides across the floor. I try to force myself into Aksel, to control him, and I can feel no thoughts in him, only a hollowness—he runs at Løren again, and Løren stabs the machete deep into his brother’s gut.
Aksel gasps. Blood seeps from his stomach and onto the floors. He looks up at Løren with surprise, but his eyes are empty now. Red spills from his open mouth. He drops to the ground.
I stand where I am, trapped in my shock—but Løren is quick to move. He begins to pull his brother’s arms. He wants my help, needs my help, it’s easy to see. My hand, trembling, reaches for the handle of the machete still sticking from Aksel’s stomach, but Løren snaps at me not to touch it.
“He’ll bleed out,” he tells me. “Pick up his feet.”
I pick up Aksel’s feet. His body is heavy. He was spineless, a coward, but he’d been even larger than Engel Jannik. His eyes are stuck open, wide with shock. I pray to the spirits and the divine gods above that no slave will see us now, and my prayers are answered. We carry him through the hall, back out into the gardens. I want to be rid of the body as quickly as possible, and start for the cliffs, but Løren again shakes his head. We carry Aksel, both of us sweating and heaving, down the dirt path until we reach the rocky sand. Here Løren pulls the machete out, and he was right: Blood spurts, but dies down quickly. Løren throws the blade into the sea, and he and I wade out into the water with Aksel as far as we can, up to our shoulders, my dress floating around me, coral scratching the bottoms of my feet. We let him drift. The tide will carry him out to the ocean, where hopefully his body will be torn apart by the sharks. I can only pray that the water won’t bring him back to shore.
The two of us stand where we are for some time, as though the roots from my nightmares have wound their way around our feet. I can’t speak, can barely breathe. The shock of it all begins to take over my body now. The memory of him suddenly appearing, as though out of thin air, rushing at Løren in such a way, he meant to kill his brother, completely unprovoked—he might’ve tried to kill me next, might’ve succeeded…
We walk back up onto the sand, breathless. Løren won’t meet my eye.
“He tried to kill you,” I tell him. “He came out of nowhere, and he tried to kill you. There’s nothing else you could’ve done.”
“If anyone learns the truth, I’ll be hung,” he tells me. There’s no excuse for a slave to kill their master. I don’t bother to argue with him on this; he speaks the truth.
I can attempt to speak on Løren’s behalf, as I’ve done before, but Løren didn’t simply hit Aksel across the face this time. The kongelig won’t leave this slave’s punishment to me. They will come and they’ll force their way into this house and they’ll drag Løren to the groves to hang him from his neck. I do have my kraft, but I’ve never been able to control more than one person at a time. It’s a fight that I will lose.
We walk back along the path to the Jannik house. I expect him to follow me inside, to go to the library, but he doesn’t step through the threshold. He lets me see that he needs to walk, to think. He wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway. The shock vibrates through Løren as well, though he keeps his face impassive. His muscles are taut beneath his skin. He’d acted in self-defense. He wouldn’t have allowed his brother to take his life. He couldn’t help that he’d fought back, but now he knows he’ll die anyway.
Marieke can plainly see that something is wrong the next day, but I’m afraid to tell even her the truth. I know what she would say to me: that I’m not so weak as to imprison myself—that I can’t be afraid to face the kongelig. The killer is getting closer to seeing their own goals won, and if they learn of Aksel’s murder, they’ll be glad to see me executed next. But the more the kongelig kills as they control the king, the more that kongelig helps me as well. There’re fewer people in the room now, and if I’m to believe Patrika’s grief, and if I’m still to trust that Jytte Solberg would not act against me so aggressively, then the killer can only be either Lothar Niklasson or the Nørup twins. I still want to trust that Erik and Al
ida Nørup have no desire for the crown—and so I feel my focus on Lothar Niklasson growing.
My plans have had to constantly shift and evolve since I came to this island, but new plans begin to build in my mind now. I can’t trust any of the kongelig, this is certain, but there are ways I can use them. Patrika Årud and the Nørup twins might be particularly helpful.
I stay in my bed, peering out over my balcony for a sign of Løren’s return, but I don’t see him. I sleep, fleetingly, falling in and out of dreams where one moment, I open my eyes and Freja Jannik sits beside me, dirt and leaves tangled in her hair, and the next, I’m walking through the maze of the Rose manor, listening to my mother’s screams.
I hear a voice, low and laughing. I fall into sleep again, and when I wake, the voice is louder. It strikes me that the voice sounds like Aksel’s, but I think only that this is another trick of my mind. But the laughter doesn’t end. I stand from my bed, wandering the hall and walking down the stairs. I find him in the sitting room. Erik is there with him. The two have been drinking. Aksel’s pain darkens the air. Even with a grin cracked across his face, I can see that with every pulse he mourns Beata. He’s alive, without a machete’s wound in his stomach. Both men notice me and stop laughing. They look at me with confused frowns. I’m still in my sleeping clothes, and I’m staring at Aksel as though a fever has taken me and driven me into madness.
Erik asks, “Are you well, Elskerinde Jannik?”
I’m not well. That much I do know. Perhaps another storm-season sickness has taken me without my realizing it and I’ve been sick for weeks now; perhaps I never recovered from the first, and my entire time spent here on Hans Lollik Helle has only been a hallucination, a dream. I might’ve convinced myself that the king is only a puppet, pulled by invisible strings; might’ve convinced myself that one of the kongelig holds a kraft so powerful that they control reality itself. Nothing feels real now, nothing certain.
I don’t answer them. I turn, walking quickly through the halls. When I enter the library, Løren is sitting in his corner, a book open in his lap.
He snaps the book shut. A slave shouldn’t know how to read, and I’ve caught him now for a second time. But when he sees the look on my face, his fear of punishment leaves him.
Løren doesn’t care for me, not in the slightest, but even he can’t resist asking me what’s wrong, and if something has happened.
“Your brother is alive,” I tell him.
He stares at me, expressionless.
“He’s in the sitting room right now, speaking with Erik Nørup.”
“Is everything all right?” Løren asks me.
I’m shaking now, trembling. “You killed him,” I tell Løren. “Last night. You stuck a machete into his gut.”
Løren shakes his head, looking at me with confusion and the slightest touch of pity. He never thought he’d feel such a thing for me, but I look as mad as I feel, I can see it in his eyes: My hair tangled, in my sleeping gown, dark circles beneath my eyes, and telling him stories I’m so certain are real. Last night had been real, I know that it was, but the look on Løren’s face tells me otherwise. He would love to have killed his brother, there’s no doubt about that, but he didn’t. He walked me back to the Jannik house last night after my meeting with the kongelig, and he left me at the front door as he went around to the back, to the slaves’ entrance of the kitchens, and came to the library. He’s been here since last night, hoping that I wouldn’t call on him, hoping that he could hide away for the rest of the day. He hasn’t seen me since then. He most certainly didn’t kill his brother. All of this he thinks to himself—but for the glimmer of a moment, I don’t believe him. I wonder if it’s possible that he’s found a way to lie to me. If he’s only playing a game with me, just as the kongelig do.
Løren tells me he’ll call for Marieke, and walks past the library’s doorway, leaving me behind. I make my way to the shelves, to the book he left on the floor. It’s on the history of these islands, as told by a Fjernman. I know this book. Claus had read it in the libraries of the manor of Rose Helle. He’d told me the history of these islands, a history passed down from one mouth to the next, stories belonging to our ancestors and our people; but it wasn’t a history we were supposed to remember, nor one we were supposed to keep. The history as told by the Fjern could be the only truth. Their divine right to take these lands from the savages, to hold us captive in our own home. Marieke enters the library to find me crying. I’m afraid that she’ll be annoyed with me, but she isn’t, not this time. She takes my arm and guides me back to my bed. She feels my face and tells me that I don’t have a fever but that I might be at the beginning of another bout of storm-season sickness. She makes me broth and lemongrass tea. I drink it all dutifully, and she smooths down my hair and hums a song to me as she did when I was a child. I close my eyes, and she pulls my sheets up around me and leaves my chambers, but I can’t sleep. I stand from my bed and go to the balcony overlooking the churning of the sea.
“Are you feeling better?”
I turn, and Løren is standing at my threshold. He walks inside and shuts the door behind him. It’s just as he pulls a knife that I feel the truth: This isn’t Løren. He has no soul, no emotion. He rushes at me, and the blade pierces my stomach. Pain flourishes, fire spreading through my gut and over my skin. My vision flickers. I fall to the floor. I must’ve screamed, because the door bangs open, and my vision goes black, then white, though I can hear Marieke’s voice.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I’m still alive, though I probably shouldn’t be. I want to ask Løren if the spirits who’ve kept him alive all these years have now decided to protect me as well, but I don’t see him in the days that follow, and I don’t ask him to come to my rooms. I’m too afraid to look at him, when his face had been the last thing I saw before I was stabbed. I know that Løren’s thoughts would insist on his innocence, but I know also that nothing is a coincidence on Hans Lollik Helle.
Marieke stays by my bedside, though at first I’d screamed at her to leave, uncertain whether she was real or another one of the ghosts haunting Hans Lollik Helle. She sits at my side, holding my hand, eyes closed as she whispers her prayers to the spirits to heal me. It shouldn’t have happened this way. Marieke knows that I’m in her mind, but she doesn’t argue with me when I sink into her memories. She’d been in the kitchens, readying another pot of lemongrass tea for me, when she heard the scream and the crash that’d followed. She raced down the hall and up the stairs, only to find me on the ground with a knife in my gut. The blood on my hands suggested I’d stabbed myself, though where I’d gotten the knife I couldn’t say. I didn’t recognize the knife. It hadn’t come from the kitchens. Marieke decided it had belonged to a vengeful spirit, enraged that I hadn’t killed the kongelig and freed my people. She’d taken the knife from my room and thrown the blade into the sea.
I couldn’t speak at all for the first few days, and I could barely open my eyes. I mostly slept, but when I woke for a few moments of each day, Marieke was always by my side. Marieke wasn’t sure I would survive, even with the herbs and salves she’d applied and reapplied without stop, praying to the spirits not to take me yet. I know this is the truth, because I’d heard her prayers, even as I ran across the shore with a laughing Ellinor, and while Inga sang her songs, tying ribbons in my hair. I asked them both where our mother was, and they only smiled. I walked the maze until I came upon the sitting room of the Rose manor, and there she sat, fiddling with a needle and thread. She wouldn’t look at me as I called for her. Tante’s voice whispered in my ear.
When I woke, Marieke was praying beside me, my hand in hers. I gripped her fingers, pain moving through me like a living thing. My voice was harsh and low as I said her name. Marieke’s eyes widened. She murmured that her prayers had been answered. Maybe they were. She asked me what happened, but I could only speak a few words. Marieke patted my hand, understanding the effort, and told me that it was all right, to be quiet and to rest. Even as I felt h
er spirit, her memories, fear built in me. I sensed Marieke’s presence, the life that filled her, but she could also draw a hidden blade and plunge it into me. She could just as easily be a product of my mind.
When I wake again, Marieke speaks to me without stopping, filling the silence with her soothing voice. She tells me of memories we shared, traveling the north. She’d never seen anything like it, the cobblestone streets and towering buildings and people, so many people. She’d longed for the islands, longed for her home by the cliffs of Rose Helle, missed her little girl and the child’s father as well. She’d hidden her sadness from me, over the years, and her rage. She’d put all of her energy into raising me as if I’d been her own. But there’d been days, yes, when she’d considered leaving me—taking the money she carried for me and finding her freedom. She never considered it for very long, thinking of what my mother’s spirit might do to her if she ever had.
She tells herself she grew to love me. This, along with needing to see her little girl’s killers dead, is why she stays beside me.
I don’t leave my bed for days. I sleep, listening to Marieke’s voice and Tante’s whispers. Freja Jannik takes my hand, and Ellinor’s laughter sounds like my mother’s screams. Fire licks at my bed, the curtains, my hair and skin, and when I try to shout for help, it’s gone. A storm lashes at the windows, blowing rain and wind all around me, sky illuminated with purple lightning, but when I cry in Marieke’s arms, it’s over.
I sit up in my bed with a gasp, yellow sunlight filling the room and blinding me. Pain bursts, and I stand to my feet, pulling up the ends of my dress. My wound has been stitched, black thread woven through my skin. My head feels foggy, as though I’ve been asleep for weeks.
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