Queen of the Conquered

by Kacen Callender

  I hear the shouts long before I reach the Jannik house. I hurry my pace until I see the house standing on the cliff. There’s a fight: Malthe and three other slaves are trying to subdue someone, a man, Løren, who tries to break free. Malthe holds Løren’s arms behind his back, but Løren nearly pulls himself away. It’s only when I stop before them that he surrenders. He allows himself to be pushed down to his knees.

  Malthe is out of breath. “He was found,” he tells me, gasping for air, “on the shores of Larsen Helle, my lady, just as you said he would be.”

  Løren is thinner now, his muscles and bones straining against his skin. He’d been burned by the sun on his cheeks and shoulders. His hair is tangled, longer now. He smells of the sea, like salt and hot sand. But his eyes. His eyes are the same. The burning hatred, the fury for me and everyone around him. There’s also a softness—regret, perhaps, maybe a feeling of betrayal. He never should have let me know his plans of escaping Hans Lollik Helle.

  Aksel emerges from the house. He stands on the porch, leaning against the railing, watching with his arms crossed. He has no smile on his face, but I can feel that he mocks me. This is the boy I’ve made such an effort to protect, and this is how Løren has repaid me: challenging my authority over him, my ownership as his mistress. Aksel wants me to know that this is how Løren has always been, and always will be. He wants me to know that if I give Løren enough freedom, one night he will strangle me in my sleep. Aksel wants me to put Løren to death. He won’t say it, won’t demand it, because this time it’s clear to all that he’s right—has been right all along about Løren. There isn’t any way I can let the boy attempt to escape without showing all of my slaves his punishment.

  “Why would you do this?” I ask Løren.

  He doesn’t respond. He’s still on his knees, squinting at me in the sunlight.

  “Why did you run?” I ask him. “I treat you well, don’t I?” My voice lowers, though all gathered can still hear me. “I let you come and go as you please. I let you speak to me as though you are my equal, when we both know that you’re not. And yet you work to embarrass me, to undermine me, to challenge me.”

  And even now, he challenges me—watching me as he does, refusing to look away, his wall carefully in place. He dares me to have him killed. He believes I’m too much of a coward, I can see it from the look on his face; he doesn’t believe, not for a moment, that I will prove to him that I am a true kongelig. Not when I have so badly wanted his approval, his friendship, his love—not when I have made him a symbol of the people who will never accept me.

  I tell Malthe to prepare for Løren’s execution. He will die by hanging tomorrow night, before all of the slaves and kongelig of Hans Lollik Helle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Konge Valdemar requests the presence of the kongelig, and so we all return to the meeting room as the sky turns purple and as the moths and gnats and fruit bats take flight. The manor Herregård Constanjin is in shadow, the windows black. It’s easier to see the cracks in the walls, the tears in the wallpaper. The council room’s mahogany gleams, but the light feels grayer.

  I sit at the table with Patrika Årud, who won’t meet anyone’s eye, and Alida and Erik Nørup, who’re silent as well, both of them tense as they exchange their questions and thoughts, a conversation between the two that no one else can share. They argue about their responsibilities to this island and to all of Hans Lollik. Erik wants to leave, despite the ambition I can feel in him. With Beata and Olsen’s deaths, it’s become clear that someone among the kongelig is willing to kill for the title of regent, and Erik is far from willing to die for such a thing. Alida agrees, yes, but she also knows that their titles as heads of the Nørup family require them to stay. Erik wonders to his sister if I might be using my kraft to spy on their thoughts, and the two glance at me as one as I turn my gaze to the surface of the table.

  Lothar Niklasson is here as well, sitting to the side of the empty chair that awaits the king, who hasn’t yet come. Jytte isn’t here, either. This is strange. Jytte is usually the first to arrive, eager to please the king and earn her place above Lothar. It’s a lofty goal for a woman like her to hope to rise to power over the king’s trusted adviser, but it’s been her goal nonetheless. Lothar meets my eye, and he knows that I, too, am wondering where Jytte is, where the king is, and whether a Solberg assassin waits to kill us all. The king is meant to choose the next regent in just one week’s time. Jytte’s ambitions could make her act irrationally—try to have us all killed, try to convince the king that she had nothing to do with our deaths so that she can be chosen.

  My tension eases into relief as I sense the familiar presence of anger that always accompanies Jytte, but my relief turns to confusion, then alarm as the doors of the council room slam open and Jytte strides inside. Alida stands and hurries to Jytte’s side without hesitation. Erik gapes. Patrika rises from her seat as well, turning toward the door to see if a threat follows, but none does.

  Lothar is calm. “What happened?” he asks.

  Jytte’s hands are cut, red flowing where she’d caught a blade, held and kept it from cutting her neck. Alida rips the bottoms of her white dress and wraps the fabric around Jytte’s palms, saying that they need to be washed with hot water and salt.

  “It was in the groves,” she tells us. “Olsen Årud called to me. He stood to the side of the dirt path.”

  Patrika’s attention snaps to the woman. “You play a cruel joke.”

  “I don’t,” Jytte says, her eyes steeled. “Olsen Årud called to me. I was afraid, confused—someone came behind me. They tried to cut my neck, but I grabbed the blade before they could. I pushed away from them and turned around.”

  I know what she’s going to say before she does, her eyes fixed on me. She tells them that it was me. It had been me holding the machete, Jytte’s blood on my hands.

  “It must have been a trick,” Alida says. “Elskerinde Jannik has been here this entire time.”

  “A trick, yes,” Jytte agrees, “played by Elskerinde Jannik. She has a control on us. You all refuse to see it. She plays her mind games, and you’re all too foolish to see the truth.”

  “It wasn’t me,” I say.

  “It was you, in that very dress, holding your blade.”

  “If I wanted you dead, Elskerinde Solberg, I wouldn’t be foolish enough to try and kill you myself.”

  This wasn’t the right thing to say. Jytte is trembling in her anger. She might have attempted to strangle me if the pain in her hands weren’t so strong, growing by the second alongside her rage.

  Lothar puts an end to the argument before either of us can speak again. “I don’t see how it could’ve been Elskerinde Jannik,” he tells Jytte. “She’s been here, in this meeting room, as Alida had noted. But someone clearly has made an attempt on your life. I propose we retire to the safety of our homes. I’ll have a message sent to the king about what’s taken place.”

  I can see in Lothar that he’s starting to suspect that the king was never going to appear in the meeting room tonight, in the same way that the king didn’t appear for the watching of the whales; Herre Niklasson’s worry for our lives, and especially his own, grows. We leave, Jytte storming from the room first. The others have their unspoken questions as we trail down the halls. Questions on assassins and the possibility of ghosts.

  Aksel waits for me in my chambers, standing on my balcony overlooking the churning of the black sea. I hesitate, unsure whether it’s really him, or if he’s just another trick. He doesn’t have a smile for me—Aksel will never have a smile for me, I’m sure of this—but he doesn’t look at me with burning hatred, either. He doesn’t watch me, wanting me to know how badly he wants to see me hanging from a tree, rope cutting into my neck. He isn’t staggering, rum filling his veins. He almost looks as he did months before, glaring at me from the halls of his dead mother’s house. He’d still been in control then. He’d made his choice to marry me and was resolved to live with that decision. He was
n’t yet filled with regret and loathing, both for me and for himself. Now he’s returned to a similar peace. He still mourns Beata Larsen—he will never stop mourning his beloved—but he has at least come to a place where he realizes that the past won’t change, no matter how much rum and wine he drinks, no matter how hard he hits. And so Aksel is ready to move on. There’s also an odd feeling in him, one I never expected to find: He’s grateful to me. Grateful, that I’ve commanded the death of his brother, when he never had the courage to do so himself.

  “People have always liked to pretend his innocence,” Aksel says. “They pity him, act like he’s some sort of martyr. Even my father had an odd love for Løren.”

  A love that he never shared for Aksel, it seemed. Aksel had never been good enough for his father. The man would give Aksel a challenge and delight in the boy’s failures: memorize the history of the islands of Han Lollik, or beat Løren in a skirmish; climb a coconut tree as though he were a slave and bring his father back a seed; or, for once in his short life, manage not to embarrass his father at one of the kongelig’s garden parties. Aksel had tried so hard to appease his father and bring the man pride, but it seemed all he ever managed to do was bring shame to the Jannik name.

  There was a morning when Engel Jannik wanted to test his son’s swimming. Aksel didn’t know why; there was never any real need for him to go into the sea, and his father knew the boy had a fear of the ocean. He demanded that Aksel swim out as far as he could—added, in a spark of inspiration, that Aksel was to swim out as far as he could in a contest against the slave boy Løren. If Løren managed to swim farther than Aksel, Aksel knew his father would beat him, as he always did whenever Løren managed to best him.

  The two swam. Barely half of a minute passed before Aksel was already exhausted, his limbs heavy, but Løren swam like he was made of the sea. The waves became rougher, the tide’s pull became stronger, and Løren only swam alongside Aksel the way a fish might move through the water. Aksel was out of breath, a stitch in his side, salt burning his eyes. He kicked, but hadn’t been able to feel the seafloor for some time, and only saw darkness beneath him, when he was so used to seeing the sand and coral. He stopped, gasping, wave after wave knocking him down. Løren stopped as well. He watched Aksel. He watched the boy, drowning, and he did nothing. He watched as though waiting for Aksel to die.

  Aksel turned around. He wasn’t sure he would make it. He had such a fear that he would die that he still has nightmares of drowning sometimes. But finally he did make it, stumbling onto the sand. Løren came in behind him, standing tall and breathing steady. Aksel well remembers the beating he received that day, because although Engel usually waited until they were inside of the house, today he beat his son right there on the beach for everyone to see. Aksel didn’t want to bring the Jannik any more shame, and so tried to take the beating in silence, but this somehow enraged his father even more. He’d beat the boy unconscious. Aksel was confined to bed for three days before he could stand on his own two feet. And all the while, Løren had stood by, watching.

  “Your father couldn’t have loved Løren,” I tell Aksel now. “It’s impossible to both be a master and love your slave.”

  Aksel shrugs. He doesn’t care enough one way or the other to argue. He’s decided to leave Hans Lollik Helle—that’s all he wanted to tell me, out of courtesy to our marriage, no matter that it’s a sham. I hadn’t considered a life of marriage with Aksel, living together on Jannik Helle. I’d always assumed that either I would die here on the royal island or I would kill him myself. Aksel is ready to move on from Hans Lollik Helle and the memories that haunt him. Beata’s ghost follows him wherever he goes. He sees her in the gardens, hiding behind the flowers. He sees her in the groves, smiling in the shade. He sees her body on the shore, yellow hair tangled in seaweed. He knows that her ghost will follow him to Jannik Helle and that he will likely drink himself to death—even he’s aware of this. He also knows that his death means I will inherit Jannik Helle and his manor, but he doesn’t care. His only request is that he never see me again.

  “Don’t come to Jannik Helle with me,” he says. “Please—spare me having to see you again, as a mercy.”

  I can agree to this, so Aksel turns his back on me to leave my chambers. He hopes to leave tomorrow, as soon as possible.

  “Don’t you want to watch your brother’s execution?” I ask.

  But Aksel has no need to see Løren die. The very thought scares him, though he wouldn’t easily admit to such a thing. Aksel only wants to know, finally, that Løren has died, as he should have so many times.

  The house is busier than it’s ever been once morning comes. Slaves pack Aksel’s belongings, taking them to the mangroves and its bay so that each item can be rowed to a ship. Other slaves prepare for Løren’s execution. A proper hanging tree must be found, and it isn’t an easy thing, testing branches for their strength to ensure they’ll be able to hold the weight of a man. Still other slaves rush back and forth, cleaning and cooking as they do each day.

  Marieke scrubs my back, my shoulders, and combs my hair. She wants to know if I really mean to kill the boy. She doesn’t believe that I do. She knows that I’m angry, and when I’m angry, I tend to be impulsive. I don’t think as I should, my own emotion filling my veins and my chest and my head. It doesn’t help that when I’d made my decision, I was surrounded by so many others who expected to see Løren dead. There was no way for me to know whose thoughts and feelings I’d had—those around me, or my own. This is what Marieke says.

  “Should he not be punished for trying to escape?” I ask Marieke, but she only thinks again that I don’t really mean to have the boy killed. Something like this would be impossible of me. This is what she believes. Marieke might not know me as well as we both thought she did. She doesn’t know how badly I’d wanted Løren’s acceptance, how much I want the love of my people. I’m executing Løren, I know, to punish both him and the people who hold no love for me.

  The other slaves of the household are less certain of their faith in me. I can see it in their eyes. Their hatred of me scalds my skin, twisting through my stomach, threatening to cut open my chest. I leave for the groves, twigs breaking under my feet, speckled shade leaving patterns on the ground. A hanging tree has been chosen, a noose looped over its branch, a chair placed beneath.

  Alida answers the door herself when I knock. She wasn’t expecting me, wasn’t expecting any guests, as the Nørup twins very rarely receive visitors. All know that Erik leaves the house they share whenever fun is to be had, and Alida knows, too, that all the other kongelig of the island consider her too odd, too unambitious, to make a proper ally out of her. They don’t visit her, and they don’t pass along invitations to her, either, requests to visit for tea. She prefers to remain in her home or in her secret alcove by the bay, though she’s abandoned the alcove now that she’s found me sitting in her favorite spot on the island. The alcove suddenly doesn’t feel quite as special anymore.

  She welcomes me into her home, ushering me to the sitting room, gesturing at an awaiting slave to bring us rose-mallow tea. The sitting room is all white and lace, blue floral designs to match the lily of the Nørup crest covering the wallpaper and the chaise chairs.

  “I hope you don’t mind rose-mallow tea rather than lemongrass,” she tells me. “Rose mallow is far healthier for digestion. Not something the fine people of Hans Lollik Helle often want to discuss, but an important topic nonetheless.”

  We sit together, the windows open, sunlight shining, breeze calming. Despite herself, Alida is excited to have a visitor. She’d been poring over her books all morning, as she tends to do every day on Hans Lollik Helle, but even that becomes a bit tiresome after a while. She misses Nørup Helle, misses the room where she keeps her different herb mixtures and experiments. She misses her ability to simply leave the island whenever she pleases, taking a ship to the northern empires. She wishes she could simply leave the islands for Koninkrijk. Alida feels no connection to thes
e islands; she never has, not even as a child. It’s only a sense of duty that keeps her here, watching over her brother.

  We speak on the coolness of the morning breeze, how it’ll certainly become hotter by the end of the day, how we hope we’ll be spared another storm before the end of the season. Her slave brings the tea, and we blow on the steam. Alida is too polite to speak on the topic, but she knows that my slave boy, Løren, ran away and was recaptured; she knows, too, that I’ll have him executed this evening. She’s surprised. She’d thought I’d be a little more merciful with my slaves, seeing as we have the same color of skin, the same texture of hair, the same ancestors of these islands.

  After we’ve exhausted all polite conversation, Alida asks, “What brings you here, Elskerinde Jannik?” She knows it isn’t just a pleasant visit. This doesn’t disappoint her. She doesn’t wish to be a part of the culture of the Fjern on this island, with their meaningless garden parties and teas. She’s excited by the prospect that I may have come with news, or a question perhaps—something that would be far more interesting than the time she usually spends sitting alone in this manor.